
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 

THE McEWEN COLLECTION 

OF SHAKESPEAREANA 











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THE 



SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH 



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 



CIBCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE 



BY 

APPLETON MORGAN, A.M., LL.B. 
ii 

AUTHOR OF "THE LAW OF LITERATURE," "NOTES TO BEST'S PRINCIPLES 

OF EVIDENCE," " SOME SHAKESPEAREAN COMMENTATORS," "VENUS 

AND ADONIS, A STUDY IN WARWICKSHIRE DIALECT," ETC. 



Sic vos non vobis nidificatis aves; 
Sic vos non vobis vellera fertis oves; 
Sic vos non vobis mellificatis apes; 
Sic vos non vobis fertis aratra boves. 

— P. Virgil. Maro 



SECOND EDITION 



CINCINNATI 
ROBERT CLARKE & CO 

1886 






COPYRIGHTED, 1881, 

By APPLETON MORGAN. 






TO 

D. T. MORGAN, ESQ., 

OF 
WHIP'S CROSS, WALTHAMSTOW, ESSEX, ENGLAND. 

My Dear Sir: 

I do not know your opinion on the matter treated in 

these pages. Very possibly you will disagree with every line of my 

Brief. But it gives me pleasure to connect my name with yours on 

this page, and to subscribe myself 

Very faithfully, your kinsman, 

APPLETON MORGAN. 
October, 1881. 



PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. 



When, four years ago, I prepared the first edition 
of this work, I had very little idea that its appear- 
ance was to be considered a personal affront to the 
memory of William Shakespeare, or that I was my- 
self to be accused of heterodoxy — rank disloyalty—- 
threatened with active adverse operation of the Strat- 
ford curse, etc. Being familiar with the difficulty (to 
which the more honest commentators confessed) of 
believing, from internal evidence, that but one single 
hand wrote the Plays and Poems, I supposed myself 
only doing Shakespeare students a service by group- 
ing the external evidence thereto for them as well. 
To be sure, the book presented an extreme view of the 
circumstantial case against Shakespeare, but there 
seemed to be no other plan of making the discussion 
valuable. One can hardly be expected to argue he- 
roically in support of a conceded presumption, and 
I certainly did not propose to myself a re-writing of 
the stereotype Essay on Shakespeare, which — like 
Major-General Stanley's military knowledge — accrued 

(v) 



VI PREFACE. 

at about the beginning of the present century. 
Neither did it seem to me that orthodox Shakespear- 
eans (if by that term we mean those who believe Will- 
iam Shakespeare to have written every line, exit, 
entrance — to have made every pen stroke in some 
thirty-seven plays; to have borrowed plots and inci- 
dents by the handful, but never by any chance to have 
used the words or speech of another) were exactly 
in a position to protest against an alleged claimant 
being fully, even emphatically, heard. They had cer- 
tainly had ample time to present their side. Their 
day in court had lengthened out to over two centuries. 
To raise the hue and cry against hearing the other 
side seemed to me as if they proposed to confess that 
they had half heartedly, feebly, and imperfectly pre- 
sented their own case, or felt incompetent to be in- 
trusted with it further, or lacked confidence in the 
presumption in their favor. 

Still less was I, nor am I yet, able to see anything 
emotional, anything over which gentlemen should 
lash themselves into a temper, in a passionless histor- 
ical question as to something which happened three 
hundred years ago. So long as the capital question 
of a Shakespeare Canon remains open, a discussion 
of the secondary question of the William Shake- 
speare authorship, whether considered as a whole (as 
is the method of the Baconian Society) or as to par- 
ticular works, or parts of works (as conducted by 



PREFACE. vil 

Mr. Fleay in his admirable " Shakespeare Manual," 
and Mr. Rolfe, in his invaluable " Friendly Edition "), 
would seem to be proper. I, for one, am willing to 
confess that after many years of familiarity with it 
the question as to what William Shakespeare wrote 
with his own pen, and what became his (to use Mr. 
R. G. "White's language)." after the theatrical fashion 
and under the theatrical conditions of his day," is, in 
my opinion, an inquiry as legitimate as it is fascinat- 
ing — entitled to the fullest examination and treat- 
ment on purely historical grounds; and one which 
may not only be pursued to any extent without cast- 
ing suspicion on the querist's loyalty or othodoxy, but 
whose discussion is always a contribution the more — 
and therefore always welcome — to the world's noble 
and ever magnifying Library of Shakespeareana. 

In leaving the subject of the authorship as a whole 
(for I shall never touch it, except possibly in detail, 
again), there are one or two points to which I ask 
permission to call attention, viz. : * 

I. The very great elaboration the Baconian Theory 
has received — since my first edition — at the hands of 
Mrs. Henry Pott, Mr. Ignatius Donnelly, and others. 

II. The wonderful demonstration which my friend 
Ex-Governor Davis has given in his " The Law in 
Shakespeare," of the argument from the Legalisms 
which is only touched upon in my own pages. The 
eloquent Governor has gone beyond all his predeces- 



Vlll PREFACE. 

sors in showing that the Plays are Dot only fluent 
in the use of our lawyers' and attorneys' jargon and 
technicalities; but that their very structure is legal 
and juridicial; that the Hamlet, at least, was once 
thoroughly revised by some one learned in the law 
of England, by supplying the legal explanation ol 
the succession of Fortinbras, just as, in another play, 
a misconstruction of the Salic law was set right, etc. 

On re-reading the following pages I see only two 
points as to which I have something to add, viz : 

In the first edition I was obliged to confess that 
the evidence that Sakespeare's verses were favorites at 
court, and he the friend of Southampton, did not im- 
press me as of any particular value. But it has since 
occurred to me that, although obituary poetry is not 
of any legal value as evidence, yet Ben Jonson, writ- 
ing for his contemporaries, would hardly have intro- 
duced such a line as 

" That did so take Eliza and our James," 
if he had not been pretty sure of his facts; es- 
pecially since Elizabeth's courtiers were still alive, and 
"our James" himself upon the throne. The Plays, 
then, did attract some attention at court, and the 
playwright may have been sent for, even though 
we have no evidence to that effect. And I was 
in error also in inferring that when young Shake- 
speare left Stratford for London, he was liable to arrest 
under the statute against u schollers, idlers, common 



PREFACE. IX 

players of interludes and minstrels wandering abroad, 
jugglers, tinkers and petty chapmen." On referring 
to that statute (39 Eliz. c. 4), I find that it was not 
passed until 1599, the year Shakespeare's father 
received his grant of arms. However, as to the 
friendship between Shakespeare and Southampton in 
1593, I am still not only skeptical, but every record 
of those times which I approach, confirms me in my 
disbelief. 

The answers to the first edition (I have read ninety- 
three of them) seem to me mostly sentimental. The 
only practical point made appears to be that the dis- 
crepancies of the Will are to be accounted for by 
supposing the Plays to have passed either to Mrs. 
Shakespeare the relict, or to Dr. John Hall the exec- 
utor, of the dramatist. But in either case, entries to 
that effect in the Books of the Stationers' Company 
would have been imperatively essential. And it must 
be remembered, too, that copyright in those days 
— being by common law and not by statute — did not 
expire by limitation at all, but was perpetual. (In 
other words, were it possible to trace them, we could 
find to-day parties in whom the copyright of the 
Shakespeare Plays still vests.) If light is wanted as 
to the laws of literary property in Elizabeth's and 
James's days, why guess at it, when law libraries are 
accessible, and the Books of the Stationers' Company 
extant? Blount and Jaggard, who printed the First 

• 



X PREFACE. 

Folio, were alive to their own interests, when (No- 
vember 8, 1623,) they copyrighted the sixteen Plays 
first printed in that Folio. How did they obtain a 
right to print the remaining twenty which had al- 
ready been copyrighted? Nobody knows. They did 
not re-copyright them for the simple reason that, 
having helped themselves to them, they had no legal 
rights to make registry of. Blount and Jaggard were 
not interfered with, because these Plays, having lost 
for the time their commercial value, were not es- 
teemed worth a lawsuit by their former printers. But 
the interesting fact remains that it was the firm of 
Blount and Jaggard, and not their predecessors, who 
printed " stolne and surreptitious copies." It is 
simply silly to talk, as commentators will, of Shakes- 
peare omitting to mention his Plays in his Testament, 
because his copyrights in them had expired, or be- 
cause he or his representatives had sold them to the 
Globe Theater. 

If his Plays had never been entered for copyright 
on the Books of the Stationers' Company, he or his 
executors might undoubtedly have sold them with- 
out registering the transfer. But, unfortunately, 
these Plays were registered ; and, once registered, it 
was impossible to alienate them except by registry of 
later date. If, however, William Shakespeare never 
owned more than what we call to-day a Stageright in 
the Plays, all is accounted for. There was no law 



PREFACE. XI 

compelling an entry of stageright in the Stationers' 
Books, and no public office at which anything anal- 
ogous to — (what nowadays becomes of such large pe- 
cuniary value) — a right to represent and perform 
dramatic productions — could be entered and secured. 

In reading the late autobiographies of Anthony 
Trollope and Sergeant Ballantyne, I was impressed 
with the conviction that — down to the first quarter 
of the present century — nothing thorough (except 
flogging) was considered essential to the education of 
the British youth, in country schools. 1 was led by 
this to examine carefully into what must have been 
the course of instruction in Stratford school, when 
young Shakespeare is supposed to have been a stu- 
dent thore. To make my examinations as valuable 
as possible, I cited the testimony of Roger Asham, 
John Milton, and others nearly contemporary, and 
went to the pains of compiling a considerable glos- 
sary of the Warwickshire Dialect. The result was 
too bulky, of course, for adding to this work, and 
has been published elsewhere in a volume by itself. 

While I have never yielded my assent to the Ba- 
conian theory, I have been so widely accused of 
bringing it aid and comfort that I would like to say 
a final word or two in regard to it : 

It seems to me quite as impossible that Francis Ba- 
con should have written certain portions of the Plays 
and Poems as that William Shakespeare should have 



Xll PREFACE. 

written those other portions which the general con- 
sent of the New Shakespeare Society, Mr. Fleay, Mr. 
W. J. Rolfe, and others have rejected. But yet 
Francis, afterward Lord, Bacon, was one of the most 
versatile men who ever lived. It is not safe to judge 
of his poetical powers by his Paraphrase of the 
Psalms, which was written — just as John Milton's par- 
aphrase was written — in what is to us, to-day, the 
purest doggerel. But that these versions were so 
written purposely, in order that the meanest intellects 
might commit them to memory and sing them, no 
one at all familiar with the times can doubt for a 
moment. If there is any degree in doggerel, Mil- 
ton's versions are the most ridiculous. But the pur- 
pose for which both paraphrases were made is evi- 
dently one and the same. Nor can we exactly rail at 
the absurdity of a lord chancellor of England writing 
stage plays in the days of Elizabeth, when we have 
seen a prime minister of England writing novels in 
the age of Victoria. We can, even now, hear the 
twenty-second century's comparative critic cry, 
"Ridiculous to conceive of the great Beaconsfield, 
the man whose statesmanship grappled with the 
world, who, singly and alone, confronted an empire 
in its flush of victory, and forced it to relinquish a 
prize its sword had just won — to conceive of that 
man writing a few florid and stagey novels. And 
then, if it were not ridiculous on its face, look at the 



PREFACE. Xlil 

internal evidence; count the 'stopped' and the c un- 
stopped' and the 'double' endings: the 'run on' lines, 
and the 'alternates:' and, for the 'birth marks of 
style' (which anyone not 'color-blind' can see for 
himself), put one of his speeches at the Berlin con- 
gress alongside a chapter of Lothair ! " In short, so 
versatile, so great in every literary walk of that day, 
was Francis Bacon, that nobody can wonder that the 
old school Shakespearean, — while willing to admit 
Greene, Marston, Nash, Middleton, Fletcher, or any- 
body else, a collaborateur with Shakespeare in the 
plays, — stands aghast at any approach of Francis 
Bacon to that vicinity, and cries " sacrilege 7 ' and 
" lunacy ! " 

For my part I have never been able to decide 
whether the Baconian Theory were the greater com- 
pliment to Bacon or to Shakespeare himself. Cer- 
tainly "William Shakespeare is the only man who ever 
lived whose works are accounted too sublime for him- 
self — the only man as to whom the centuries are still 
debating whether he was not — after all — a Demigod I 



Rooms op the New Yoke. 
Shakespeare Society, 
• October 2, 1885. 



PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. 



M. Guizot, in his History of England, states the 
Shakespearean problem in a few words, when he says : 

"Let us finally mention the great comedian, the 
great tragedian, the great philosopher, the great poet, 
who was in his lifetime butcher's apprentice, poacher, 
actor, theatrical manager, and whose name is William 
Shakespeare. In twenty years, amid the duties of 
his profession, the care of mounting his pieces, of in- 
structing his actors, he composed the thirty-two trag- 
edies and comedies, in verse and prose, rich with an 
incomparable knowledge of human nature, and an un- 
equaled power of imagination, terrible and comic by 
turns, profound and delicate, homely and touching, 
responding to every emotion of the soul, divining all 
that was beyond the range of his experience and for 
ever remaining the treasure of the age — all this being 
accomplished, Shakespeare left the theater and the 
busy world, at the age of forty-five, to return to Strat- 
ford-on-Avon, where lived peacefully in the most 
modest retirement, writing nothing and never return- 

(XV) 



xvi PREFACE. 

ing to the stage — ignored and unknown if his works 

had not forever marked out his place in the world — 

a strange example of an imagination so powerful, 

suddenly ceasing to produce, and closing, once for all, 

the door to the efforts of genius." 

But M. Guizot is very far from suggesting any 

prima facie inconsistency in this statement as it 

stands. 

Since every man reads the Shakespearean pages for 

himself and between the lines, much of what we are 
expected to accept as Shakespearean criticism must 
fail of universal appreciation and sympathy. But 
none who read the English tongue can well be uncon- 
cerned with the question as to who wrote those pages; 
and it would be affectation to deny that the intense 
realism of our day is offering some startling contribu- 
tions to the solution of that question. 

For instance, the gentlemen of the " New Shake- 
speare Society " (whom Mr. Swinburne rather merci- 
lessly burlesques in his recent "Studies of Shakespeare") 
submit these dramas to a quantitative analysis; and, by 
deliberately counting the "male," "female," "weak," 
and " stopped" endings, and the Alexandrines and cat- 
alectics (just as a mineralogist counts the degrees and 
minutes in the angles of his crystals), insist on their 
ability to pronounce didactically and infallibly what 
was written by William Shakespeare, and at what age ; 
what was composed by Dekker, Fletcher, Marlowe, or 



PREFACE. Xvil 

anybody else ; what was originally theirs, touched up 
by William Shakespeare or vice versa, etc. It is curi- 
ous to observe how this process invariably gives all the 
admirable sentiments to William Shakespeare, and all 
the questionable ones to somebody else ; but at least 
these £Te\v Shakespearean gentlemen have surrendered 
somewhat of the' c cast-iron"theory of our childhood — 
that every page, line, and word of the immortal 
Shakespearean Drama was written by William 
Shakespeare demigod, and by none other — perhaps, 
even opened a path through which the unbelievers 
may become, in due time, orthodox. 

There are still, however, a great many persons who 
are disposed to wave the whole question behind them, 
much as Mr. Podsnap disposed of the social evil or 
a famine in India. It is only a " Historic Doubt," 
they say, and " Historic Doubts " are not rare, are 
mainly contrived to exhibit syllogistic ingenuity in the 
teeth of facts, etc., etc. The French, they say, have 
the same set of problems about Moliere. Was he a 
lawyer? was he a doctor ? etc. — and they all find their 
material in internal evidence — e. g., an accurate 
handling of the technique of this or that profession 
or science : parallelism, practical coincidence, or some- 
thing of that sort. 

The present work is an attempt to examine, for the 
benefit of these latter, from purely external evidence, 
a question which, dating only within the current quar- 



XV111 PREFACE. 

ter century, is constantly recurring to confront inves- 
tigation, and, like Banquo's troublesome shade, seems 
altogether indisposed to " down." 

I have to add my acknowledgments to Mr. Julian 
Norris, for his careful preparation of the Index to 
these pages. 

Grandview-on-Hudson, October 2, 1881. 



THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 



PART I. 
THE MYSTERY. 




HE thirty-seven plays called, collectively, 
" Shakespeare/' are a phenomenon, not only 
in English letters, but in human experience. 
The literature of the country to which they 
belong, had, up to the elate of their appearance, 
failed to furnish, and has been utterly powerless 
since, to produce any type, likeness, or formative 
trace of them ; while the literature of other na- 
tions possesses not even a corresponding type. The 
history of a century on either side of their era dis- 
closes, within the precincts of their birth, no resources 
upon which levy could have been made for their cre- 
ation. They came and went like a meteor; neither 
borrowing of what they found, nor loaning to what 
they left, their own peculiar and unapproachable mag- 
nificence. 

The unremitting researches of two centuries have 
only been able to assign their authorship (where it 
rested at first) to an hiatus in the life of a wayward 
village lad named William Shakespeare — who fled his 
native town penniless and before the constable, to re 
turn, in a few years, a well-to-do esquire — with a coa: 

of arms and money in his pocket. 

(9) 



10 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

We have the history of the hoy, and certain items as 
to the wealthy squire, who left behind him two or three 
exceedingly common-place and conventional epitaphs 
(said to be his handiwork) and a remarkable will ; 
but, between them, no hint of history, chronicle, or rec- 
ord. Still, within this unknown period of this man's 
career, these matchless dramas came from somewhere, 
and passed current under his name. 

The death of their reputed author attracted no con- 
temporary attention, and for many years thereafter the 
dramas remained unnoticed. Although written in an 
idiom singularly open to the comprehension of all classes 
and periods of English-speaking men, no sooner did 
they begin to be remarked, than a cloud of what are 
politely called "commentators" bore down upon 
them; any one who could spell feeling at liberty to 
furnish a " reading;" and any one who supposed him- 
self able to understand one of these " readings," to 
add a barnacle in the shape of a " note." From these 
" commentators " the stately text is even now in peril, 
and rarely, even to-clay, can it be perused, except one 
line at a time, across the top of a dreary page of mi- 
croscopic and exasperating annotation. But, up to 
within a very few years, hardly a handful of Shakes- 
pearean students had arisen with courage to admit — 
what scarcely any one of the " commentators" even, 
could have failed to perceive — the utterly inadequate 
source ascribed to the plays themselves. 

It is not. yet thirty years since an American lady 
was supposed to have gone crazy because she declared 
that William Shakespeare, of the Globe and Black- 
friars theaters in London, in the days of Elizabeth, 
was not the author of these certain dramas and poems 



PART I. — THE MYSTERY. 11 

for which — for almost three hundred years — he has 
stood sponsor. 

Miss Bacon's " madness," indeed, has been rapidly 
contagious. Now-a-days, men make books to prove, 
not that William Shakespeare did not write these 
works, but that Francis Bacon, "Walter Raleigh, or 
some other Elizabethan, did not. And we even find, 
now and then, a treatise written to prove that Wil- 
liam Shakespeare was, after all, their author ; an ad- 
mission, at least, that the ancient presumption to that 
effect no longer covers the case. And, doubtless, the 
correct view is within this admission. For, probably, 
if permitted to examine this presumption by the tests 
which would be applied to any other question of fact, 
namely, the tests of contemporary history, muniments, 
and circumstantial evidence, it will be found to be 
quite as well established and proved that William 
Shakespeare was not the author of the plays that go 
by his name, as any other fact, occurring in London 
between the years 1585 and 1616, not recorded in his- 
tory or handed down by tradition, could be established 
and proved in 1881. 

If a doubt as to the authorship of the plays had 
arisen at any time during or between those years, and 
had been kept open thereafter, the probability is that it 
would have been settled by this time. But, as it is, we 
may be pretty certain that no such doubt did arise 5 
and that no such question was asked, during the years 
when those who could have dispelled the doubt or an- 
swered the question were living. When we are 
about to visit a theater in these days, what we ask 
and concern ourselves with is: Is the play enter- 
taining? Does it "draw?" And, when we wit- 



12 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

ness it, the question is : Do we enjoy it — or does 
it bore us? Will we recommend our friends to 
come that they may be entertained, too, and 
that we may discuss it with them ? or will Ave warn 
them to keep away? We very speedily settle these 
questions for ourselves. Doubtless we may and do in- 
quire who the author is. But we do not enter into 
any discussion upon the subject, or charge our minds 
enough with the matter to doubt it when we are told. 
The author's name is, not unusually, printed on the 
play-bill before us; we glance at it indifferently, take 
what is told us for granted, and think no more about 
it. If the name happens to be assumed, we may pos- 
sibly see its identity discussed in the dramatic columns 
of our newspapers next morning, or we may not. If 
the play entertains us, we commend it. If it drags, 
we sneer at it, get up and go off. That is all the con- 
cern we give it. The evening has slipped away; and, 
with it, any idle speculations as to the playwright who 
has essayed to amuse us for an hour. 

If, three hundred years hence, a question as to who 
wrote the play we saw at Mr. Daly's theater or Mr. 
Wallack's theater last evening should come up, there 
would be very little evidence, not any records, and 
scarcely an exhibit to refer to in the matter. Copies 
of the play -bill or the newspapers of the day might 
chance to be discovered ; but these — the internal testi- 
mony of the play itself, if any, and a sort of tacit 
presumption growing out of a statement it was no- 
body's cue to inquire into at the time it was made, and 
had been nobody's business to scrutinize since — would 
constitute all the evidence at hand. Now this sup- 
posititious case is precisely all-fours with the facts 



PART I. — THE MYSTERY. 13 

in the matter of the dramatic works which we call, 
collectively, Shakespeare's. Precisely: except that, 
on the evenings when those plays were acted, there 
were no play-bills, and, on the succeeding morn- 
ing, no daily newspaper. We have, therefore, in 
1881, much fewer facilities for setting ourselves right 
as to their authorship than those living three hundred 
years after us could possess in the case we have supposed. 
The audiences who witnessed a certain class of plays 
at Shakespeare's theaters, in the years between 1585 
and 1616, were entertained. The plays "drew." Peo- 
ple talked of them about town, and they become val- 
uable to their proprietors. The mimic lords and ladies 
were acceptable to the best seats; the rabble loved the 
show and glitter and the alarum of drums ; and all 
were Britons who gloated over rehearsal of the prow- 
ess of their own kings and heroes, and to be told that 
their countrymen at Agincourt had slain ten thousand 
Frenchmen at an expense of but five and twenty of 
themselves. But, if M. Taine's description of the 
Shakespearean theaters and the audience therein wont 
to assemble may be relied upon, we can pretty safely 
conclude that they troubled themselves very little 
as to who fashioned the dialogue the counterfeit kinsrs 
and queens, soldiers, lords, and ladies spoke ; or that 
they saw any thing in that dialogue to make such 
speculation appear worth their while. Nor can we 
discover any evidence, even among the cultured cour- 
tiers who listened to them — or in the case of Elizabeth 
herself, who is said to have loved them (which we may 
as. well admit for the argument's sake) — that any rec- 
ognition of the plays as works worthy of any other 
than a stage-manager, occurred. 



14 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

Even if it should appear that these plays thus per- 
formed were the plays we now call Shakespeare's ; had 
any of this audience suspected that these plays were 
not written for them, hut for all time; that, three hun- 
dred years later — when the plays should not only he 
extant, hut more loved and admired than ever — the 
thinking world should set itself seriously to probe the 
mystery of their origin ; there might have been some 
interest as to their producer manifested, and we might 
have had some testimony competent to the exact point 
to-day. 

But it is evident enough that no such prophetic 
vision was vouchsafed to them, and no such prophetic 
judgment passed. Nor is the phenomenon excep- 
tional. The critic does not live, even to-day, however 
learned or cultured or shrewd, who would take the re- 
sponsibility of affirming upon his own judgment, or 
even upon the universal judgment of his age and race, 
that any literary composition would be, after a lapse 
of three hundred years, not only extant, but immortal, 
hugged as its birthright by a whole world. Such a 
statement would have been contrary to experience, be- 
yond the prophecy of criticism, and therefore only to 
be known — if known at all — as a Fact. Moreover, it 
could only be known as a fact at the expiration of the 
three hundred years. Doubtless, few critics would 
care, in any case, to commit themselves upon record 
one way or the other in a matter so hypothetical and 
speculative as the judgment of posterity upon a liter- 
ary performance, and certainly nothing of the sort oc- 
curred in Shakespeare's day, even if there were any 
dramatic or literary critics to speculate upon the sub- 
ject. There can be no doubt — and it must be conceded 



PART I. — THE MYSTERY. 15 

— that certain acted plays did pass with their first au- 
diences, and that certain printed plays, both contempo- 
raneously and for years thereafter, did pass with the 
public who read them, as the compositions of Mr. 
Manager Shakespeare; and that probably even the 
manager's pot companions, who had better call to 
know him than any others, saw nothing to shake their 
heads at in his claim to be their author (provided he 
ever made any such claim ; which, by the way, does 
not appear from any record of his life, and which no- 
body ever asserted as a fact). If they did — with the 
exception only of Robert Greeue — they certainly kept 
their own counsel. On the one hand, then, the ques- 
tion of the authorship was never raised, and, on the 
other hand, if it had been, the scholars and critics who 
studied the plays (supposing that there were any such 
in those days) could not possibly have recognized them 
as immortal. If they had so recognized them, they 
would doubtless have left us something more satisfac- 
tory as to the authorship of the compositions than the 
mere " impression that they were informed" that the 
manager of the theater where they were produced 
wrote them; that they supposed he was clever enough 
to have done so, and they therefore took it for granted 
that he did. That is all there is of the evidence of 
Shakespeare's own day, as to the question — if it still 
is a question — before us. 

But how about the presumption — the legal presump- 
tion, arising from such lapse of time as that the mem- 
ory of man runneth not to the contrary — the presump- 
tion springing from tradition and common report — that 
William Shakespeare composed the Shakespearean 
plays ? It is, of course, understood that one presump- 



16 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

tion is as good as another until it is disturbed. It is 
never safe to underrate an existing presumption ; as 
long as it stands at all, it stands as conclusive; once 
overthrown, however, it is as if it had never existed. 

A presumption three hundred years old may be a 
strong one to overthrow. But if its age is all there is 
of it — if it be only strong in years — it can yet be top- 
pled over. Once overthrown, it is no more venerable 
because it is three hundred years old than if it were 
only three. An egg-shell will toss upon the crest of 
an angry surf, and, for very frailty, outride breakers 
when the mightiest ship man ever framed could not 
survive an instant. But it is only an egg-shell, for all 
that, and a touch of the finger will crush and destroy 
it. And so, formidable as it was in age, the pre- 
sumption as to William Shakespeare's authorship of 
the great dramas which for three hundred years had 
gone by his name, had only to be touched by the thumb 
and finsrer of common sense to crackle and shrivel like 
the egg that sat on the wall in the Kindergarten rhyme, 
whieh all the king's army and all the king's men could 
not set up again, once it had tumbled over. 

But as the world advanced and culture increased, 
why did not the question arise before? Simply be- 
cause the times were not ripe for it. This is the age 
and generation for the explosion of myths, and, as one 
after another of them falls to pieces and disappears, 
who does not wonder that they have-not fallen sooner? 
For how r many years has the myth of William Tell been 
cherished as historv! And yet there is no element of 
absolute impossibility or even of improbability — much 
less of miracle— in the story of an archer with a sure 
eye and a steady aim. Or, in the case of physical 



PART I. — THE MYSTERY. 17 

myths — which only required an exploration by physi- 
cal sense for their explosion — the maps of two centu- 
ries or so ago represented all inaccessible seas as 
swarming with krakens and ship-devouring reptiles. 
And it is not twenty years since children were taught 
in their geographies that upon the coast of Nonvay 
there was a whirlpool which sucked down ships prow 
foremost. And here, in our midst, a cannon-shot from 
where we sit and write these lines, there w T as be- 
lieved to be and exist a Hell Gate which was a very 
portal of death and slaughter to hapless mariners. 
But there are no krakens, and not much of a Mael- 
strom; and, for twenty years before General Newton 
blew up a few rocks at Hell Gate, people had laughed 
at the myth of its ferocity. And again : nothing is 
easier than to invent a story so utterly unimportant 
and immaterial that it will be taken for granted, 
without controversy, and circulate with absolute im- 
munity from examination, simply because worth no- 
body's while to contradict it. For example, it is likely 
enough that Demosthenes, in practicing oratory, stood 
on a sea-beach and drilled his voice to outroar the 
waves. The story is always told, however, with the 
rider, that Demosthenes did this with his mouth filled 
with pebble-stones; and, as nobody cares whether he 
did or not, nobody troubles himself to ascertain by 
experiment that the thing is impossible, and that no- 
body can roar with a mouth full of pebble-stones. 
And not even then would he succeed in removing the 
impression obtaining with the great mass of the world, 
that a thing is proven sufficiently if it gets into " print." 
Charles II. set the Royal Society of his day at work to 
2 



18 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

iiud the reason why a dead fish weighed more than a 
live one — and it was only when they gave it up, that 
the playful monarch assured them that the fact they 
were searching for the reason of was not a fact at all. 
It is not impossible to demonstrate from experience, 
that the human mind will be found — as a rule— to 
prefer wasting laborious clays in accounting for, rather 
than take the very simplest pains to verify even a 
proposition or alleged fact, which, if a fact at all, is of 
value beyond itself. It was objected to the system of 
Copernicus, when first brought forward, that, if the 
earth turned on its axis as he represented, a stone 
dropped from the summit of a tower would not fall at 
the foot of it, but at a great distance to the west, in 
the same manner that a stone dropped from the mast- 
head of a ship in full sail does not fall at the foot of 
the mast, but toward the stern. To this it was an- 
swered that a stone, being a part of the earth, obeys 
the same laws and moves with it, whereas it is no part 
of the ship, of which, consequently, its motion is inde- 
pendent. This solution was admitted by some and 
opposed by others, and the controversy went on with 
spirit ; nor was it till one hundred years after the death 
of Copernicus that, the experiment being tried, it was 
ascertained that the stone thus dropped from the head 
of the mast does fall at the foot of it. And so, if, in 
the case of the Shakespearean authorship, the day 
lias come for truth to dispel fiction, and reason to scout 
organic miracle, why should we decline to look into 
an alleged Shakespearean myth simply because it hap- 
pens to be a little tardy in coming to the surface? 

But, most of all, it is to be remembered that it is, 
practically, only our own century that has compre- 



PART I. THE MYSTERY. 19 

h ended the masterliness and matehlessness of the 
'•Hamlet" and u Macbeth," and the rest of those tran- 
scripts of nature, the prophetic insight of whose 
author "spanned the ages that were to roll up after 
him, mastered the highest wave of modern learn- 
ing and discovery, and touched the heart of all time, 
not through the breathing of living characters, but 
by lifting mankind up out of the loud kingdom of 
earth into the silent realm of infinity ; who so wrote 
that to his all-seeing vision schools and libraries, 
sciences and philosophies, were unnecessary, because 
his own marvelous intuition had grasped all the past 
and seen through all his present and all his future, and 
because, before his superhuman power, time and space 
had vanished and disappeared." 1 The age for which 
the dramas were written had not come, in that Eliza- 
bethan era. The tongues of the actors were tied, the 
ears of the audience were deaf to syllables whose bur- 
den was for the centuries that were to come after. 
The time for the question, " Who wrote them?" was 
not yet. For two hundred years more — from the day 
of William Shakespeare's death down to years within 
the memory of those now living — down to at least the 
date of Lord Byron (who admits that it is the perfectly 
correct thing to call Shakespeare "god-like," "mighty," 
and the like, but very unfashionable to read him), — 
we may ransack the records of scholarship and criti- 
cism, and unearth scarcely a hint of what is now their 
every -where conceded superiority, to say nothing of 
their immortality. In short, we can not rise from 
such a search without understanding, very clearly in- 



1 Jean Paul Frederich Richter. 



20 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

deed, why our question did not arise sooner. Nobody 
asked, *• Who wrote Shakespeare?' 3 because nobody 
seemed to consider " Shakespeare " as any thing worth 
speculating about. Let us pause right here to dem- 
onstrate this. 

Fuller, in 1622, chronicles that William Shakes- 
peare's " genius was jocular," his comedies merry, and 
his tragedies wonderful ; his wit quick, but that his 
learning was very little. Evelyn notes that, in 1661, 
be saw " Hamlet, Prince of Denmark," played : "but 
now the old plays begin to disgust this refined age, 
since His Majesty has been so long abroad." l Pepys, 
his contemporary, says that the " Midsummer-Night's 
Dream" "was the most insipid, ridiculous play he 
had ever seen. .... and, but having lately 
read the ' Adventures of Five Hours,' ' Othello ' 
seemed a mean thing," though he liked Davenant's 
opera of " Macbeth," with its music and dancing. 2 
When spending some money in books he looks 
over Shakespeare, but chooses " ' Hudibi as,' the book 
now 7 in the greatest fashion for drollery," instead. It is 
doubtful if Milton ever read the Shakespearean plays, 
in spite of the eloquent verses, " What needs my 
Shakespeare," etc.; since, in "L' Allegro," he speaks of 
his (Shakespeare's) " native wood-notes wild." 3 Surely 
if there is any thing in letters that is not " native wood- 
notes/' it is the stately Shakespearean verse, full of 
camps and courts, but very rarely of woodlands and 

1 "Amenities of Authors — Shakespeare," p. 210. 

2 Ibid., p. 211. 

3 Dr. Maginn, in his Shakespearean papers ("Learning of 
Shakespeare'), endeavors to explain what Milton meant by 
" native wood-notes wild." 



PART I. — THE MYSTERY. 21 

pastures ; besides, whatever Milton might say of the 
book called ''Shakespeare" in poetry — like Ben Jon- 
son — he showed unmitigated contempt for its writer 
in prose : about the worst thing he could say about 
his king in " The Iconoclast," was that Charles I. kept 
an edition of Shakespeare for his closet companion. 1 
" Other stuff of this sort," cries the blind poet, " may 
be read throughout the whole tragedy, wherein the 
poet used much license in departing from the truth of 
history." 2 

In 1681, one Galium Tate, supposed to be a poet (a 
delusion so widespread that he was actually created 
" poet laureate ") stumbled upon " a thing called 
Lear," assigned to one William Shakespeare, and, after 
much labor, congratulated himself upon having "been 
able to make a - play out of it." 3 John Dryden, in or 
about 1700, in his "Defence of the Epilogue," a post- 
script to his tragedy " The Conquest of Granada," 
says: "Let any man who understands English, read 
diligently the works of Shakespeare and Fletcher, and 
I dare undertake that he will find in every page either 
some solecism of speech, or some notorious flaw in 
sense; and yet these men are reverenced, when we are 
not forgiven." He denounces "the lameuess of their 
plots," made up of some " ridiculous incoherent story, 
. . . either grounded on impossibilities, or, at least, 

1 "Amenities of Authors — Shakespeare," vol. ii, p. 208. Ibid., 
p. 209, note. 

2 It is fair to say that " stuff" may only have meant " matter," 
but it is indisputable that the passage was meant as a slur on one 
who would read "Shakespeare." 

3 The "play" he did make out of it is to be found in W. H. 
Smith's " Bacon and Shakespeare," p. 129. 



22 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

so meanly written that the comedy neither caused your 
mirth nor the serious part your concernment. . . . 
he writes, in many places, below the dullest writers of 
our own or any precedent age." Of the audiences who 
could tolerate such matter, he says : " They knew no 
better, and therefore were satisfied with what the} 7 
brought. Those who call theirs the ' Golden Age of 
Poetry,' have only this reason for it: that they were 
then content with acorns before they knew the use 
of bread," etc. 1 To show the world how William 
Shakespeare should have written, Mr. Dryden publishes 
his own improved version of "Troilus and Cressida," 
with an abjectly fulsome dedication to the Earl of 
Sunderland, and a Preface, 2 in which he is obliging 
enough to say that the style of Shakespeare being "so 
pestered with figurative expressions that it is as af- 
fected as it is obscure ; " that, though " the author seems 
to have began it with some fire, the characters of 
'Pandarus' and * Troilus' are promising enough, but, 
as if he grew weary of his task, after an entrance or 
two, he lets 'em fall, and the latter part of the tragedy 
is nothing but a confusion of drums and trumpets, ex- 
cursions and alarms. The chief persons who give name 
to the trjgedy are left alive. 'Cressida' is left alive 
and is not punished." " I have undertaken to remove 
that heap of rubbish. ... I new- modelled the 
plot; threw out many unnecessary persons, improved 

1,1 Works," edited by Malone, vol. ii, p. 252. 

2 " Troilus and Cressida, or Truth Found Too Late." Written 
by John Dryden, servant to his Majesty, London (4to) printed 
for Abel Small, at the Unicorn at the West End of St. Paul's, and 
Jacob Tonson, at the Judge's Head, in Chancery Lane, near 
Fleet street. 1679. 



PART I. — THE MYSTERY. 23 

those characters which were begun and left unfinished, 
. . . made, with no small trouble, an order and 
connection of the scenes, and ... so ordered 
them that there is a coherence of 'em with one an- 
other, ... a due proportion of time allowed for 
every motion, . . . have refined the language," etc. 
The same thing was done in 1672, by Ravenscroft, 
who produced an adaptation of " Titus Andronicus," 
and boasted "that none in all the author's works ever 
received greater alterations or additions; the language 
not only refined, but many scenes entirely new, besides 
most of the principal characters heightened, and the 
plot much increased." John Dennis, a critic of that 
day, declares that Shakespeare "knew nothing about 
the ancients, set all propriety at defiance, . . . was 
neither master of time enough to consider, correct, and 
polish what he had written, . . . his lines are ut- 
terly void of celestial fire," and his verses " frequently 
harsh and unmusical." He was, however, so interested 
in the erratic and friendless poet that he kindly altered 
" The Merry Wives of Windsor," and touched up 
" Coriolanus," which he brought out in 1720, under the 
title of " The Invader of his Country, or the Fatal Re- 
sentment." The play, however, did not prosper, and 
he attributed it to the fact that it was played on a 
Wednesday. Dean Swift, in his " The Narrative of 
Dr. Robert Norris, concerning the Strange and Deplor- 
able Frenzy of John Dennis," relates how the said Den- 
nis, being in company with Lintot, the bookseller, and 
Shakespeare being mentioned as of a contrary opinion 
to Mr. Dennis, the latter " swore the said Shakespeare 
was a rascal, with other defamatory expressions, which 
gave Mr. Lintot a very ill opinion of the said Shake- 



24 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

speare." Lord Shaftesbury complains, at about the 
same date, of Shakespeare's "rude and unpolished 
style and antiquated phrase and wit." 1 Thomas 
Eymer knows exactly how Othello, which he calls 
" a bloody farce, the tragedy of the pocket-hand- 
kerchief," ought to have been done. In the first 
place, he is angry that the hero should be a black-a- 
moor, and that the army should be insulted by his be- 
ing a soldier. Of "Desdemona" he says: " There is 
nothing in her which is not below any country kitchen- 
maid — no woman bred out of a pigstye could talk so 
meanly." Speaking of expression, he writes that " in 
the neighing of a horse or in the growling of a mastiff 
there is a meaning, there is as lively expression, and, 
I may say, more humanity, than in the tragical flights 
of Shakespeare." He is indignant that the catas- 
trophe of the play should turn on a handkerchief. He 
would have liked it to have been folded neatly on the 
bridal couch, and, when Othello was killing Desde- 
mona, " the fairy napkin might have started up to dis- 
arm his fury and stop his ungracious mouth. Then 
might she, in a trance of fear, have lain for dead; then 
might he, believing her dead, and touched with re- 
morse, have honestly cut his own throat, by the good 
leave and with the applause of all the spectators, who 
might thereupon have gone home with a quiet mind, 
and admiring the beauty of Providence freely and 
truly represented in the theater. Then for the un- 
raveling of the plot, as they call it, never was old 

1 Mr. De Quincy's painful effort to demonstrate that neither 
Dryden nor Shaftesbury meant what he said is amusing reading. 
See his " Shakespeare" in the " Encyclopaedia Britannica." Also 
Knight, "Studies of Shakespeare," p. 510, as to Dr. Johnson. 



PART I. — THE MYSTERY. 25 

deputy recorder in a country town, with his spectacles 
on, summing up the evidence, at such a puzzle, so 
blundered and bedoltified as is our poet to have a good 
riddance and get the catastrophe off his hands. What 
can remain with the audience to carry home with 
them? How can it work but to delude onr senses, 
disorder our thoughts, scare our imaginations, corrupt 
our appetite, and fill our head with vanity, confusion, 
tintamarre and jingle-jangle, beyond what all the 
parish clerks in London could ever pretend to?" He 
then hopes the audience will go to the play as they go 
to church, namely, "sit still, look on one another, 
make no reflection, nor mind the play more than they 
would a sermon." With regard to "Julius Caesar," 
he is displeased that Shakespeare should have meddled 
with the Romans. He might be "familiar with 
Othello and Iago as his own natural acquaintances, 
but Caesar and Brutus were above his conversation." 
To put them "in gulls' coats and make them Jack- 
puddens," is more than public decency should tolerate 
— in Mr. Rymer's eyes. Of the well-known scene be- 
tween Brutus and Cassius, this critic remarks : " They 
are put there to play the bully and the buffoon, to 
show their activity of face and muscles. They are to 
play for a prize, a trial of skill and hugging and swag- 
gering like two drunken Hectors for a twopenny reck- 
oning." Rymer calls his book "A Short View of 
Tragedy, with Some Reflections on Shakespeare and 
Other Practitioners for the Stage." Hume thought 
that both Bacon and Shakespeare showed " a want of 
simplicity and purity of diction with defective taste 
and elegance," and that " a reasonable propriety of 
3 



26 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

thoughts he (Shakespeare) can not at any time up- 
hold." Voltaire thought the Shakespearean kings 
" not completely royal." Pope (who declared that 
Kymer, just quoted, was " a learned and strict critic"), 
to show that he was not insensible to the occasional 
merits of the plays, was good enough to distinguish, 
by inverted commas, such passages as he thought 
might be safely admired by the rest of mankind ; while 
Richard Steele, in " The Tatler," 1 borrows the story 
of the " Taming of the Shrew," and narrates it as 
"an incident occurring in Lincolnshire," feeling, no 
doubt, that he did a good deed in rescuing whatever 
was worth preserving from the clutches of such ob- 
scure and obsolete literature ! 

And then came the period when scholars and men 
of taste were ravished with Addison's stilted rhymes, 
and the six-footed platitudes of Pope, and the sesqui- 
pedalian derivatives dealt out by old Samuel Johnson. 
The Shakespearean plays are pronounced by Mr. Ad- 
dison 2 "very faulty in hard metaphors and forced 
expressions," and he joins them with " !Nat. Lee," as 
" instances of the false sublime." Samuel Johnson is 
reported as saying that William Shakespeare never 
wrote six consecutive lines (he subsequently made it 
seven) without " making an ass of himself," (in which 
speech he seems to have followed his namesake with- 
out the " h," old Ben, in the " Discoveries") — backing 
up his assertion with some very choice specimens of 
literary criticism. Let any one, interested enough in 

1 Vol. vi, No. 31. He complains, in number 42, that the female 
characters in the play make " so small a figure." 
8 Spectator, 39; p. 285. 



PART I. — THE MYSTERY. 27 

the matter to see for himself, take down Dr. Johnson's 
own edition of Shakespeare, and read his commen- 
taries on the Shakespearean text. Let him turn, for 
example, to where he says of " Hamlet " : 

We must allow to the tragedy of " Hamlet " the praise of 
variety. The incidents are so numerous that the argument of 
the play would make a long tale. The scenes are interchangeably 
diversified with merriment and solemnity, . . . that includes 
judicious and instructive observations. . . . New characters 
appear from time to time in continual succession, exhibiting 
various forms of life and particular modes of conversation. The 
pretended madness of Hamlet causes much mirth; . . . 
the catastrophe is not very happily produced ; the exchange of 
weapons is rather an expedient of necessity than a stroke of art. 
A scheme might easily be formed to kill Hamlet with the daggei- 
and Laertes with the bowl. 

Again, of " Macbeth :" 

This play is deservedly celebrated for the propriety of its fic- 
tion, and solemnity, grandeur, and variety of its action, but it has 
no nice discriminations of character. ... I know not 
whether it may not be said in defense of some parts which now 
seem improbable, that in Shakespeare's time it was necessary to 
warn credulity against vain and illusive predictions. 

Again, of " Julius Caesar :" 

Of this tragedy, many particular passages deserve regard, and 
the contention and reconcilement of Brutus and Cassius is uni- 
versally celebrated. But I have never been strongly agitated in 
perusing it, and think it somewhat cold and unaffecting, etc. 

Was "Hamlet" a low comedy part, in the days 
when all England bowed at the feet of an unkempt 
and mannerless old man, awed by the brilliancy of his 
" literary judgment ? " And did Hamlet's " pretended 
madness " cause " much mirth " to the age, or only to 



28 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

Samuel Johnson ? People now-a-days do not sit and 
giggle over " the pretended madness of Hamlet." 
But, waiving these questions, let him turn to the 
"Rambler," 1 of this excellent lexicographer, and 
read him (patiently, if he can), citing the magnificent 
lines — 

Come thick night 
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell ; 
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes, 
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark 
To cry " hold, hold /" 

as an example of " poetry debased by mean expres- 
sions ;" because " dun " is a " low " expression, " sel- 
dom heard but in the stable ; " " knife " an instru- 
ment used bv butchers and cooks in the meanest em- 
ployment;" and asking "who, without some relax- 
ation of his gravity, can hear of the avengers of guilt 
peeping through the blanket of the dark!" Let the 
reader look on a little further, and find this fossil- 
scanning machine telling oft' the spondees and dactyls 
in the dramas (to ascertain if the caesura was exactly 
in the middle) on his fingers and thumbs, and count- 
ing the unities up to three, to see if he could approve 
of what the ages after him were to worship! if, 
haply, this Shakespeare (although he might have de- 
vised a scheme to kill Laertes with the bowl and Ham- 
let with the dagger, or might have thrown a little more 
fire into the quarrel with Brutus and Cassius) could 
be admitted to sit at the feet of Addison, with his 
sleepy and dreary " Campaign ;" or Pope, with his 
metrical proverbs about "Man;" or even the afore- 
said Samuel Johnson himself, with his rhymed dic- 

1 $o. 168. 



PART I. — THE MYSTERY. 29 

tionaries about the " vanity of human wishes," and 
so on* Let himjfind the old lexicographer admitting, 
in his gracious condescension, that " The Tempest " " is 
sufficiently regular ; " of " Measure for Measure" that 
" the unities are sufficiently preserved;" that the " Mid- 
summer Night's Dream" was " well written ;" that the 
style of the " Merchant of Venice" was " easy ; " but 
that in "As you Like It" "an opportunity of ex- 
hibiting a moral lesson " is unhappily lost. The " Win- 
ter's Tale" is " entertaining;" in " King John " he finds 
" a pleasing interchange of incidents and characters," 
remarking that "the lady's grief is very affecting." 
Of " Troilus and Cressida " the old formalist says, that it 
" is one of the most correctly written of Shakespeare's 
plays ; " of " Coriolanus," that it " is one of the most 
amusing." But, he says, that "Antony and Cleopatra " 
is " low " and " without any art of connection or care of 
disposition." He dismisses " Cymbeline " with the re- 
mark that he does not care " to waste criticism upon 
unresisting imbecility ; upon faults too evident for de- 
tection and too gross for aggravation." He is pleased to 
approve of " Romeo and Juliet," because " the incidents 
are numerous and important, the catastrophe irresist- 
ibly affecting, and the process of the action carried on 
with such probability, at least with such congruity to 
popular opinions, as tragedy requires" and, while on 
the whole, approving of " Othello," he can not help re- 
marking that, " had the scene opened in Cyprus, and 
the preceding incidents been occasionally related, there 
had been little wanting to a drama of the most exact 
and scrupulous regularity." And so on every-where ! 
Let the reader imagine one thus patronizing these 
mighty and deathless monographs to-day ! Let him 



30 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

imagine a better illustration, if he can, of what our 
Johnson's friend Pope called — in long meter — " fools 
rushing in where angels feared to tread !" And let 
him confess to himself that these were not the times 
nor the men to raise the question. 

Is it not the fact that, until our own century, the 
eyes of the world were darkened, and men saw in 
these Shakespearean dramas only such stage plays, sat- 
isfying the acting necessities of almost any theater, as 
might have been written — not by "the soul" of any 
age ; not by a man " myriad-minded ;" not by a " morn- 
ing-star of song," or a " dear son of memory," but — 
by a clever playwright? The sort of days when 
an Addison could have been pensioned for his dreary - 
and innocent " Campaign," and a Mr. Pye made poet- 
laureate of the land where an unknown pen had once 
written " Hamlet ;" were, consequently, not the days 
for the discovery with which this century has crowned 
itself — namely, the discovery that the great first of 
poets lived in the age when England and America 
were one world by themselves, and that they must 
now draw together again to search for the master 
" who came " — to use, with all reverence, the words 
of Judge Holmes—" upon our earth, knowing all 
past, all present, and all future, to be leader, 
guide, and second gospel of mankind." But the full- 
ness of time has come, and we now know that, who- 
ever was the poet that he " kept," he was of quite an- 
other kidney than the manager of the theater, William 
Shakespeare, who employed him to write Plays, and 
who wrote Revelations and Gospels instead. 

If we were interested to inquire what manner of 
man Mr. Manager Shakespeare was, we have only to 



PART I. — THE MYSTERY. 31 

look about us among the managers of theaters in this 
latter half of our nineteenth century. Let us take 
Mr. Wallack or Mr. Daly, both of whom arrange plays 
for the stages of their own theaters, for example; or, 
better yet, take Mr. Dion Boucieault, who is an actor 
as well as a manager, and is, moreover, as successful 
in his clay as was William Shakespeare in his. Mr. 
Boucieault has, so far, produced about one hundred and 
thirty-seven successful plays. Mr. William Shakes- 
peare produced about a hundred less. All of Mr. Bou- 
cicault's plays show that gentleman's skillful hand in 
cutting, expanding, arranging, and setting for the 
stage; and in the representation of them, Mr. Bouci- 
eault has himself often participated. In like man- 
ner, Mr. Shakespeare, the manager, we are told by 
tradition, often assisted at the representation of the 
dramas produced on his boards, playing the Ghost in 
"Hamlet" 1 not only, but a range of other impor- 
tant parts not likely to have been assumed by him, un- 
less an actor of considerable ability. We happen to 
know, also, that Mr. Shakespeare rewrote for the stage 
what his unknown poet, poets, or friends composed, 
from the tolerable hearsay testimony of his fellow 

1 And played it, it is thought by some, so wretchedly that he 
made "the gods" hoot. At any rate, in a pamphlet published 
by Lodge, in 1596, "Witt's Miserie and the World's Madness; 
Discovering the Devil's Incarnate of this age," a devil named 
" Hate-Vertue"- is described as looking " as pale as the vizard of 
the ghost, which cried so miserably at the theatre like an oister- 
wife, 'Hamlet — Revenge.'" But perhaps Shakespeare did not 
play the ghost that night. Shakespeare also played "Old 
Knoweiy' Jonson's " Every Man in his Humor," "Adam," in 
"As You Like It," and, according to Jonson, a part in the latter's 
" Sejanus," in 1603. 



32 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

actor, Ben Jonson, who tells us that he remembers 
to have heard the players say that the stage copies of 
the plays were written in Shakespeare's autograph, 
and were all the more available on that account, be- 
cause he (Shakespeare), was a good penman, in that 
"whatever he penned, he never blotted line." 1 Mr. 
Boucicault, while claiming the full credit to which he 
is entitled, is quite too clever, as well as too conscientious 
to set up for an original author or a poet, as well as a 
playwright. Neither does Shakespeare (as we have 
already said), anywhere appear to have ever claimed 
to be a poet, or even to have taken to himself — what 
we may, however, venture to ascribe to him — the merit 
of the stage-setting of the dramatic works, which, 
having been played at his theater, we collectively call 
the "Shakespearean plays" to-day. Why, then, to 
begin with, should we not conceive of Mr. Manager 
Shakespeare discharging the same duties as Mr. Wal- 
lack, Mr. Daly, or Mr. Boucicault? as very much — 
from the necessities of his vocation — the same sort of 
man as either of them ? 

There is scarcely any evidence either way ; but the 
fact that the actors were in the habit of receiving their 
fair copy of these plays from the manager's — William 
Shakespeare's — own hand, seems to make it evident 
that he did not originally compose them. Indeed, if 
Shakespeare had been their author, well-to-do and 
bustling manager as he was, he would probably have 
intrusted their transcription to some subordinate or su- 
pernumerary ; or, better yet, would have kept a play- 
wright of experience to set his compositions for the 

1 See Post, part III, the Jonsonian Testimony. 



PART I. — THE MYSTERY. 33 

stage, to put in the necessary localisms, " gags," and 
allusions to catch the ear of the penny seats. Such a 
division of labor is imperative to-day, and was im- 
perative then — or at least to suppose that it was not, 
is to suppose that of his dozen or so of co-managers, 
William Shakespeare was the one who did all the 
work, while the others looked on. 

But, it is surmised that Shakespeare was his own 
playwright ; took the dramas and rewrote them for the 
actors ; he inserted the requisite business, the exits, 
and entrances, and — when necessary — suited the read- 
ing to the actor who was to pronounce the dialogue, 
according as he happened to be fat or lean. 1 Such was 

1 It may be noted that the line, " He's fat and scant of breath," 
does not occur in the early and imperfect edition of " Hamlet" 
of 1603. Was it added to suit Burbadge ? And was there a fur- 
ther change made also to suit Mr. Burbadge, the leading trage- 
dian of the time ? In the edition of 1603, the grave-digger says 
of Yorick's skull: 

Looke you, here's a skull hath bin here this dozen year, 
Let me see, ever since our last King Hamlet 
Slew Fortenbrasse in combat, young Hamlet's father, 
He that's mad. 

But in all subsequent editions, the grave-digger says : " Here's 
a skull now ; this skull has lain i' the earth three and twenty 
years." The effect of this alteration is to add considerably to 
Hamlet's age. "Alas, poor Yorick ! " he says, " 1 knew him, 
Horatio; a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He 
hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now how ab- 
horred in my imagination it is ! My gorge rises at it. Here hung 
those lips that I have kissed, I know not how oft," etc. How 
old, then, was Hamlet when Yorick died ? But Hamlet's age is 
even more distinctly fixed by other lines which do not occur in 
the early edition of 1603 : 

Hamlet. — How long hast thou been a grave-maker? 



34 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

the employment which fell to the part of William 
Shakespeare, in the division of labor among the man- 
agement in which he was a partner, and the resulting 
manuscript was what Ben Jonson's friends told him 
of. For nobody, we fancy, quite supposes that the 
poet, whoever he was, produced " Hamlet" one even- 
ing, " Macbeth" on another, and "Julius Caesar" on 
another, without blotting or erasing, changing, prun- 
ing or filing a line, and then handed his original drafts 
to the players next morning to learn their parts from ! 
This is not the w T ay that poems are written (nor, we 
may add, the way theaters are managed). The greater 
the geniuses, the more they blotch and blot and dash 
their pens over the paper when the frenzy is in pos- 
session of them. And besides, the fact that there ex- 
ist to-day, and always have existed, numerous and di- 
verse readings of the Shakespearean text, does very 
clearly show that their author or authors did, at differ- 
ent times, vary and alter the construction of the text 

First Clown. — Of all the days i' the year, T came to't that day 
that our last King Hamlet o'ercame Fortenbras. 

Hamlet. — How long is that since ? 

First Clown. — Can not tell that? Every fool can tell that; it 
was the very day that young Hamlet was born ; he that is mad 
and sent to England. 

And presently he adds : 

I have been sexton here, man and boy, thirty years. 

Mr. Marshall writes : "It would appear that Shakespeare ad- 
ded these details, which tend to prove Hamlet to have been 
thirty years old, for much the same reason as he inserted the 
line, 'He's fat and scant of breath,' namely, in order to render 
Hamlet's age and personal appearance more in accordance 
with those of the great actor, Burbadge, who personated him." 
The edition of 1603 is generally accounted a piratical copy of 
the first sketch of the play. — All the Year Round. 



PART I. — THE MYSTERY. 35 

as taste or fancy dictated, and, therefore, that the manu- 
scripts Ben Jonson's friends saw and told him of (and 
Heminges & Condell, as far as their testimony is of any 
value, confirm Jonson, for they assert that " what he 
thought, he uttered with that easiness that we have 
received from him scarce a blot in his papers''), were 
the acting copies, and not the original manuscripts of 
the Shakespearean plays. 

With the exception of Ben Jonson (to whose pane- 
gyric we devote a chapter in its place further on), the 
contemporaries of William Shakespeare, who celebra- 
ted his death in verse, nowhere assert him to have 
been the myriad-minded Oceanic (to use Coleridge's 
adjectives) genius which we conceive him now-a-days — 
which he must have been to have written the works 
now assigned to him. Let any one doubting this 
statement open the pages of Dr. Ingleby's " Shakes- 
peare's Centurie of Prayse," a work claimed by its 
compiler to be inclusive of every allusion to, comment 
or criticism on Shakespeare, which Dr. Ingleby has 
been able to unearth in print, dating anywhere within 
one hundred years of Shakespeare's death. We have 
industriously turned every page of this work, and will 
submit to any other who will do the same, the ques- 
tion whether it contains a line which exhibits William 
Shakespeare as any other than a wit, a successful actor, 
a'poet of the day, a genial and generous friend, a writer 
of plays, or whether — when eulogistic of the plays 
called his seven years after his death (a very different 
list, by the way, than the one assigned him during his 
life), rather than biographical as to the man, they are 
of any more value as evidence than Gray's or Milton's 
magnificent apostrophes to a genius with whom their 



36 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

only familiarity was through report, rumor, or impres- 
sion derived from the ever immortal works. For, 
like Gray, Coleridge, Emerson — all that John Mil- 
ton knew about William Shakespeare was pure hear- 
say, derived from local report or perusal of the Shakes- 
pearean plays (" a book invalued," he calls them). 
Even if we were called upon to do so, we could hardly 
conceive Milton— a Puritan, and a blind Puritan at that 
— as much of a play-goer or boon companion of actors 
and managers. But we are not called upon to imagine 
any thing of the sort; for, as a matter of fact, John 
Milton was exactly seven years and four months old 
when William Shakespeare died. And so, what is 
called "the Milton testimony," upon examination, 
proves to be no testimony at all, but only hearsay — 
venerable, perhaps — but hearsay, nevertheless; 1 as 
utterly immaterial as his "warbling his native wood 
notes wild" — aline that might be, not inaptly, applied 
to Eobert Burns, but which suggests almost any thing 
except the stately and splendid pages of the Shakes- 
pearean opera — to which we have before alluded as 
justifying us, indeed, in wondering if the Puritan poet 
had ever gone so far, before formulating his opinion, as 
to open the book assigned to the Shakespeare he wrote 
of. And so, in the first place, there was no great call 
or occasion for discussion as to the authorship of the 
Shakespearean dramas in the days when they first be- 
gan to be known by the public ; and, as for Mr. Manager 
Shakespeare's friends, and the actors of his company, 

1 Milton was the enemy of all the ilk. "This would make 
them soon perceive what despicable creatures our common 
rimers and playwriters be," he says in his essays " of Education," 
in 1634. 



PART I. — THE MYSTERY. 37 

they testified to what they had heard, and, if they 
knew any thing to the contrary, they kept it to them- 
selves. If his friends, jealous of his reputation, they 
were not solicitous of heralding him a fraud; and if 
the " stock" upon his pay-roll, they held their bread 
at his hand, and were not eager to offend him. If — as 
we shall notice further on — a wise few did suspect the 
harmless imposition, either they had grounds for not 
mentioning it, or there were reasons why people did 
not credit them. And so, in the second place, the 
times were not ripe for the truth to be known, because 
there was nobody who cared about knowing it, and 
nobody to whom it could be a revelation. 

To suppose that William Shakespeare wrote the 
plays which we call his, is to suppose that a miracle 
was vouchsafed to the race of man in London in the 
course of certain years of the reign of Elizabeth. If, 
however, instead of probing for miracles, we come to 
consider that men and managers and theaters in the 
age of Elizabeth were very much the same sort of 
creatures and places that we find them now; that, 
among the habitues of the Globe and Blackfriars Thea- 
ters in that reign, were certain young gentlemen of 
abundant leisure and elegant education who admitted 
managers into their acquaintance by way of exchange 
for the entre^of the green-room ; and that managers in 
those days as in these, were always on the alert for 
novelties, and drew their material — in the crude, if 
necessary, to be dressed up, or ready made, if they 
were so fortunate — from wherever they could find it; 
if, in short, we find that among the curled darlings 
who frequented Master William Shakespeare's side 
doors there was at least one poet, and, in their vicinity, 



38 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

at least one ready writer who was so placed as to be 
eager to write anonymously for bread (and who, more- 
over, had access to the otherwise sealed and occult 
knowledge, philosophy, and reading, of which the 
giants of his day — to say nothing of the theater-man- 
agers — did not and could not dream) — if, we say, we 
consider all this, we need pin our faith to no miracles, 
but expect only the ordinary course of human events. 
If William Shakespeare were an unknown quantity, 
like Homer, to be estimated only by certain masterly 
works assigned to him, this answer might, indeed, be 
different. For, just as Homer's writings are so mag- 
nificent as to justify ascribing to him — so far as mere 
power to produce them goes — any other contemporary 
literature to be discovered, so the works attributed to 
William Shakespeare are splendid enough to safely 
credit him with the compositions of any body else ; of 
even so great a man as Bacon, for example. But 
William Shakespeare is no unknown quantity — 
except that we lose sight of him for the few years 
between his leaving Stratford, and (as part proprietor 
of the largest London play-house) accepting Ben Jon- 
son's play of " Every Man in His Humour " — we know 
pretty well all about him. There are half a hundred 
biographies extant — new ones being written every day 
— and any one of them may be consulted as to the 
manner of life William Shakespeare's was. The 
breakneck marriage bond, which waived all for- 
malities, the consent of any body's parents, justifi- 
cation of sureties, three askings of banns, etc., so he 
could only be fast married ; the beer-bouts, youthful 
and harmless enough; the poaching, enough worse, 
Sir Thomas Lucy thought, to justify instructing a War- 



PART I. — THE MYSTERY. 39 

wick attorney to prosecute the lad before the law: all 
these are matter of record, amply photographing for 
us William Shakespeare in Stratford. Then the hiatus 
— and this same lad appears, prosperou s, and in the great 
town ; sending home money to his impoverished family 
— part proprietor of a theater, purchasing freehold es- 
tates in London — a grant of arms for his father — the 
great house in his native village for his own home- 
stead; investing in the tithings of his county, and be- 
ginning a chancery suit to recover lands which his 
father — in his poverty — had allowed himself to forfeit 
by foreclosure. Surely we will not go far astray if 
we set it down that some pretty hard work at what 
this rising lad found to do in London, and learned to 
do best, has filled up those unrecorded years ! Was 
all this money made by writing plays for the Globe, 
or by working on Bacon's Novum Organum, or by 
other literary labor? Was that the hard work Wil- 
liam Shakespeare found to do, and laid up money at, 
in the interval between his last crop of wild oats at 
Stratford, and the condescension of the man of affairs 
in London ? If it were, it is curious that no rumor or 
tradition of it comes from Stratford. Nothing travels 
quite so fast in rural neighborhoods as a reputation 
for " book learning," while the local worthy, who has 
actually written a book of his own, is a landmark in 
his vicinage. Now, William Shakespeare died one of 
the richest men — if not the richest — in all Stratford. It 
is strange that the gossip and goodwives, who so loaded 
themselves with his boyish freaks and frailties, should 
never have troubled themselves about his manly pur- 
suits and accomplishments. The only English com- 
positions he is credited within Stratford gossip are one 



40 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

or two excessively conventional epitaphs on Elias 
James, John a Coombe, and others — the latter of 
which is only to be appreciated by a familiarity with 
Warwickshire patois. He sprang from a family so il- 
literate that they could not write their own name; and, 
moreover, lived and died utterly indifferent as to how 
anybody else wrote it — whether with an " x " or a " g," 
a"c" ora"ks." And as he found them, so he left 
them. For, although William Shakespeare enjoyed an 
income of $25,000 (present value of money) at his 
death, he never had his own children taught to read 
and write, and his daughter Judith signed her mark 
to her marriage bond. 

That the rustic youth, whom local traditions vari- 
ously represent as a scapegrace, a poacher, a butcher's 
apprentice, and the like, but never as a school-boy, a 
student, a reader, a poet — as ever having been seen 
with a book in his hand — driven by poverty to shift 
for himself, should at once (for the dates, as variously 
given by Mr. Malone and Mr. Grant White, are ex- 
ceedingly suggestive) become the alter ego of that 
most lax, opulent, courtly, and noble young gentleman 
about town, Southampton, is almost incredible. But, 
it is no more incredible than that this ill-assorted 
friendship can be accounted for by the lad's superhu- 
man literary talents. Southampton never was sus- 
pected, during his lifetime, of a devotion to literature, 
much less of an admiration for letters so rapt as to 
make him forget the gulf between his nobility and 
that of a peasant lad — who (even if we disbelieve his 
earliest biographers as to the holding horses and car- 
rying links) must necessarily have been employed in 
the humblest pursuits at the outset of his London 



PAKT I. — THE MYSTERY. 41 

career. But yet, according to the various " chronolo- 
gies " (which, in the endeavor to crowd these works 
into William Shakespeare's short life, so as to tally 
with the dates — when known — of their production, 
only vary inconsiderably after all), the Stratford boy 
hardly puts in his appearance in London before he pre- 
sents Lord Southampton, as the "first heir of his in- 
vention," with — if not the most mature — at least the 
most carefully polished production that William 
Shakespeare's name w T as ever signed to ; and, more- 
over, as polished, elegant, and sumptuous a piece of 
rhetoric as English letters has ever produced down to 
this very day. 

Now, even if, in Stratford, the lad had mastered all 
the Latin and Greek extant ; this poem, dedicated to 
Southampton, coming from his pen, is a mystery, if 
not a miracle. The genius of Robert Barns found its 
expression in the idiom of his father and his mother, 
in the dialect he heard around him, and into which he 
was born. When he came to London, and tried to 
warble in urban English, his genius dwindled into 
formal commonplace. But William Shakespeare, a 
peasant, born in the heart of Warwickshire; without 
schooling or practice, pours forth the purest and most 
sumptuous of English, unmixed with the faintest trace 
of that Warwickshire patois, that his neighbors and 
coetaneans spoke — the language of his own fireside! 
As a matter of fact, English was a much rarer accom- 
plishment in the days when Thomas Jenkins and 
Thomas Hunt were masters of Stratford Grammar 
School, than Greek and Latin. Children, in those 
days, were put at their hie, hsec, hoc at an age when we 
4 



42 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

send them to kindergartens. But no master dreamed 
of drilling them in their own vernacular. Admitting 
William Shakespeare to have been born a poet, he 
must also have been born a master of the arbitrary 
rules of English rhetoric, etymology, syntax, and pros- 
ody, as well, to have written that one poem. But, say 
the Shakespeareans, even if William did not study 
English at the Stratford Grammar School, or read it 
in those crowded days when earning his bread by 
menial employment in stranger London, he had an 
opportunity to study Lyly, Eash, Greene, Peele, Chet- 
tle, and. the rest. But the Shakespearean vocabulary 
— like the whole canon of the plays — is a thing apart 
—unborrowed, unimitated, and unlearned from any 
of these. These were satisfied to write for the stages 
of the barns called " play-houses," and for their audi- 
ences, which — according to all reports — were decidedly 
indifferent as to scholarship. These might introduce 
a Frenchman, but they never troubled themselves to 
make him French ; or a Scotchman, but they never 
stopped to make him Scotch. But even if William 
Shakespeare, in the immersions of the management, 
was author of that intellectual Dane, over-refined in a 
German university of metaphysics, he called Hamlet ; 
or of that crafty Italian, named Iago ; or of that Roman 
iceberg, Brutus — it is quite as difficult to conceive 
either the skylarking boy in Stratford, where there 
were no libraries, and his father too poor (not 
daring to stir beyond his threshold for fear of arrest 
for debt) to buy books ; or the self-made man toiling 
from the bottom rung of poverty to the top of for- 
tune — with leisure to study the characteristics of race 
and nationality — as acquiring all the grandeur of die- 



PART I. — THE MYSTERY. 43 

tion, insight into the human heart (which, at least, 
is not guess-work), knowledge and philosophy, we 
call his to-day. Even if we go no further than the 
"Venus and Adonis" — appearing at a date preluding 
a drill that, for the sake of the argument, we might 
even assume — how could that poem have been written 
by the peasant who only knew his native dialect, or 
the penniless lad earning his bread in stranger London, 
at the first shift at hand — with no entre to the great 
libraries, and no leisure to use one if he had it? Ben 
Jonson spent some years at Cambridge before he was 
taken away and set at brickmaking — he is said to have 
been a very studious brickmaker, working, according 
to Fuller, with a trowel in one hand and a book in the 
other. As to his career as a soldier — a soldier, when 
not actually in the field or on the march, may find con- 
siderable opportunity for rumination ; and, when lying 
in jail, he would certainly have ample leisure for his 
Greek and Roman. But Jonson wrote for the Eliza- 
bethan theaters ; he lived and died hungry and poor, 
a borrower, over his ears in debt to the last. William 
Shakespeare, his contemporary, loaned Ben Jonson 
money ; rose rapidly from penury to affluence ; made 
his father rich, and a gentleman with an escutcheon ; 
bought himself the most splendid house in Stratford 
(so splendid as to be deemed worthy a royal residence 
by Queen Henrietta) ; invested in outlying lands ; 
speculated in tithes, and lived, until his death — accord- 
ing to Dominie Ward — at the rate of $25,000 a year. 
We are familiar enough with these stories of self- 
made men (so-called) in our daily newspapers. Let 
those who will, believe that William Shakespeare 
accumulated this splendid fortune, not by the success- 



44 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

fill management of the best appointed and affected 
theater in London, but by writing plays for its stage! 
and — at the same time — conceived, evolved from his 
own inner consciousness, all the learning which other 
playwrights (like Ben Jonson and the rest) were 
obliged — like ordinary mortals — to get out of books ! 
The only efforts made to account for this wealth 
flowing into the coffers of a poet, have been mere sur- 
mises, like the story of Southampton's munificence, 
and of the royal favor of King James, who wrote the 
manager a letter with his own hand. But neither of 
these stories happens to be contemporary with Wil- 
liam Shakespeare himself. The first was an after- 
thought of Davenant, who was ten years old when 
Shakespeare died ; and who is not accepted as an au- 
thority, even as to his ow r n pedigree, by the very com- 
mentators who most eagerly seize upon and swear to 
his Southampton fiction. The other is not even hear- 
say, but the bold invention of Bernard Lintot, who 
published an edition of the plays in 1710. Doubtless, 
as has been the ambition of all the commentators, be- 
fore Mr. Collier and since, Lintot was bound to be at 
least one fact ahead of his rivals, even if he had to in- 
vent that fact himself. He vouchsafes, as authority 
for this tale of the royal letter, however, the statement 
of " a credible person now living," who saw the letter 
itself in the possession of Davenant : in the teeth of 
the certainty that, had Davenant ever possessed such 
a letter, Davenant would have taken good care that 
the world should never hear the last of it: and coyly 
preserves the incognito of the " credible person," 
whom, however, Oldys conjectures must have been, 
if any body, the Duke of Buckingham. 



PART I. — THE MYSTERY. 45 

But, miracles aside, to consider William Shakes- 
peare as the author of the Shakespearean drama — for 
that he has christened it, and that it will go forever by 
his name, we concede — involves us in certain difficul- 
ties that seem altogether insurmountable. In the first 
place, scholars and thinkers, whose hearts have been 
open to the matchless message of the Shakespearean 
text, and who found themselves drawn to conclude 
that such a man as William Shakespeare once lived, 
were amazed to discover that the very evidence which 
forced them to that conclusion, also proved conclusively 
that that individual could not have written the dramas 
since known by his name. Coleridge, Schlegel, Goethe, 
Jean Paul Richter, Carlyle, Palmerston, Emerson, 
Hallam, Delia Bacon, Gervinus, and, doubtless, many 
more, clearly saw that the real Shakespeare was not 
the Shakespeare we have described. " In spite of all 
the biographies, ' ask your own hearts,' says Coleridge 
— ' ask your own common sense to conceive the possi- 
bility of this man being . . . the anomalous, the wild, 
the irregular genius of our daily criticism. What! 
are we to have miracles in sport ? or (I speak rever- 
ently) does God choose idiots by whom to convey di- 
vine truths to man V m - " If there was a Shakespeare 
of earth, as I suspect," says Hallam — alluding to the 
fact that all the commentators told him of the man 
Shakespeare, inferred him as anything but the master 
he was cited — " there was also one of heaven, and it is 
of him we desire to learn more." 2 

1 " Notes to Shakespeare's Works," iv., 56. — Holmes "Author- 
ship of Shakespeare," 598. 
2,1 Bacon and Shakespeare," by W. H. Smith, p. 26. 



46 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

This evidence was of three sorts: 1. Official records 
and documents ; 2. The testimony of contemporaries ; 
and, 3. That general belief, reputation, and tradition, 
which, left to itself in the manner we have indicated, 
has grown into the presumption of nearly three hun- 
dred years. We will not recapitulate the well-thumbed 
records, nor recite the dog's-eared testimony, which 
together gave rise to the presumption. But the dilem- 
ma presented to the student was in this wise: By the 
parish records it appeared that a man child was 
christened in Stratford Church April 26th, (old style) 
1564, by the name William. He was the son of one 
John Shakespeare, a worthy man, who lived by 
either, or all, the trades of butcher, wool-comber, or 
glover — three not incompatible pursuits variously 
assigned him — was, at different times, a man of some 
means, even of local importance, (becoming, on one 
occasion, even ale-taster for the town,) and, at his 
son's birth, owner in freehold of two plots of ground 
in Stratford village, on one of which plots a low- 
raftered house now stands, which has come to be a 
Mecca to which pilgrims from the whole world rever- 
ently repair. The next official record of the son so 
born to John Shakespeare is the marriage-bond to the 
Bishop of Worcester; enabling this son to wed one 
Anne Hathaway, his senior in years, which bond re- 
mains to this day on file in the office of the Preroga- 
tive Court of Canterbury. 

Later on, the son, having become a person of means, 
purchases for his father a grant of arms ;' and (the name 
being Shakespeare) the heralds allot him an escutcheon 
on which is represented a shaking spear (symbolically 
treated) — a device which, under the circumstances, 



* 



PART I. — THE MYSTERY. 47 

did not tax the heralds' ingenuity, or commit them to 
any theory about ancestors at Hastings or among the 
Saracens. The increasing wealth of the son leaves its 
traces in the title-deeds to and records of purchase of 
freehold and leasehold possessions, of the investment 
in meadow-lands, and tithes, and of sundry law suits 
incidental to these. Local tradition — which in like 
cases is perforce admitted as evidence — supplements 
all this record, and, so far as it can, confirms it, until 
we have an all but complete biography. 

This biography the world knows by heart. It does 
not esteem the boy William Shakespeare the less be- 
cause he was a boy — because — in the age and period 
reserved for that crop — he sowed and garnered his 
" wild oats." It has reason to believe him to have 
been much more than a mere wayward youth. Aubrey 
("old Aubrey," " arch-gossip Aubrey," the Shakes- 
peareaus call him, probably because he wrote his sketch 
fifty years after his subject's death, instead of two 
hundred and fifty), says that he was the village prod- 
igy, that " he exercised his father's trade — but, when 
he killed a calf he would do it in high style and make 
a speech," etc., etc. Nor is there any thing in the record 
of his mature and latter years — of his investments in 
tithes, and messuages, and homesteads — of his fore- 
closures and suits for money loaned and malt deliv- 
ered — of his begetting children and dying; leaving — 
still with finical detail and nice and exact economy — 
an elaborate testament, in which he disposes, item by 
item, of each worldly thing and chattel, down to the 
second-best bedstead in his chambers, which he ten- 
derly bestows upon the wife of his youth and the 



48 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

mother of his children — any thing at which the world 
should sneer. 

If he has done any thing worthy of posterity, he 
shows no especial anxiety that posterity shall hear of 
it. Besides such contracts and business papers as he 
must sign in the course of his lesseeship at the theaters, 
and in the investment of his savings, he leaves his 
name to nothing except a declaration of debt against 
a poor neighbor who is behind-hand with his account, 
footed at one pound fifteen shillings and sixpence, and 
a not over-creditable last Will and Testament. This 
is his own business, and who has any thing to say? 
But, when our biographers go a step further and de- 
mand that we shall accept this as the record of a demi- 
god ; of the creator of a " Hamlet " and an " Othello ;" 
and this practical and thrifty soul, who ran away to 
London — worked himself up (as he must have worked 
himself up) to the proprietorship of a theater; and, in 
that business and calling earned money and kept it^ 
as the identical man who singly and alone wrote the 
"Hamlet," the "Julius Caesar," the "Othello," and 
all the splendid pages of the Shakespearean drama — 
some of us have been heard to demur ! The scholar's 
dilemma is how to reconcile the internal evidence of 
the plays, which is spread before them undimmed by 
age, with these records, which are as authentic and be- 
yond question as the internal evidence itself. And, 
once stated, the dilemma of the scholar becomes the 
dilemma of the whole world. Let any one try to con- 
ceive of the busy manager of a theater (an employ- 
ment to-day — when the theater is at its best, and half 
the world play-goers — precarious for capital and in- 
dustry; but in those days an experiment, in every 



PART I. — THE MYSTERY. 49 

sense of the word), who succeeded by vigilance, exact 
accounting, business sagacity, and prudence, in se- 
curing and saving not only a competency, but a fair 
fortune; in the mean time — while engaged in this en- 
grossment of business — writing Isabella's magnificent 
appeal to the duke's deputy, Angelo; or Cardinal Wol- 
sey's last soliloquy! Or conceive of the man who gave 
the wife of his youth an old bedstead, and sued a 
neighbor for malt delivered, penning Antony's oration 
above Caesar, or the soliloquy of Macbeth debating 
the murder of Duncan, the invocation to sleep in 
"King Henry IV.," or the speech of Prospero, or the 
myriad sweet, or noble, or tender passages that nothing 
but a human heart could utter ! Let him try to con- 
ceive this, we say, and his eyes will open to the absurd- 
ity of the belief that these lines were written by the 
lessee and joint-manager of a theater, and he will 
examine the evidence thereafter for corroboration, 
and not for conviction; satisfied in his own mind 3 at 
least, that no such phenomenon is reasonable, proba- 
ble, or safe to have presented itself. 

Then, last and greatest difficulty of all, is the Will. 
This is by far the completest and best authenticated 
record we have of the man William Shakespeare, tes- 
tifying not only to his undoubtedly having lived, but 
to his character as a man ; and — most important of 
all to our investigation — to his exact worldly condi- 
tion. Here we have his own careful and ante-mortem 
schedule of his possessions, his chattels real and chat- 
tels personal, down to the oldest and most rickety 
bedstead under his roof. And we may be pretty sure 
that it is an accurate and exhaustive list. But if he 
5 



50 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

were — as well as a late theater-manager and country 
gentleman — an author and the proprietor of dramas 
that had been produced and found valuable, how about 
these plays? Were they not of as much value, to say 
the least, as a damaged bedstead ? Were they not, as 
a matter of fact, not only invaluable, but the actual 
source of his wealth? How does he dispose of them? 
Does our thrifty Shakespeare forget that he has writ- 
ten them ? Is it not the fact, and is it not reason and 
common sense to conceive, that, not having written 
them, they have passed out of his possession along 
with the rest of his theatrical property, along with 
the theater whose copyrights they were, and into the 
hands of others ? This is the greatest difficulty and 
stumbling-block for the Shakespeareans. If their hero 
had written these plays, of which the age of Eliza- 
beth was so fond, and in whose production he had 
amassed a fortune — that he should have left a will, in 
items, in which absolutely no mention or hint of them 
whatever should be made, even their most zealous 
pundits can not step over, and so are scrupulous not 
to allude to it at all. This piece of evidence is unim- 
peachable and conclusive as to what worldly goods, 
chattels, chattel-interests, or things in action, William 
Shakespeare supposed that he would die possessed of. 
Tradition is gossip. Records are scant and niggardly. 
Contemporary testimony is conflicting and shallow, 
but here, attested in due and sacred form, clothed with 
the foreshadowed solemnity of another world, is the 
calm, deliberate, ante mortem statement of the man 
himself. We perceive what becomes of his second- 
hand bedstead. What becomes of his plays? Is it 
possible that, after all these years' experience of their 



PART I. — THE MYSTERY. 51 

value — in the disposition of a fortune of which they 
had been the source and foundation — he should have 
forgotten their very existence? 

But if, diverging from the scanty records, we go to 
the testimony of contemporaries, what do we find there? 
Very little more of the man William Shakespeare, but 
precisely the same dilemma as to his alleged author- 
ship of the plays. We find that the country lad 
William, the village prodigy with whom the gossips 
concerned themselves, was no milksop and no Joseph; 
that he was hail-fellow with his fellows of equal age; 
that he poached — shot his neighbors' deer; lampooned 
their owner when punished for the offense; went on 
drinking-bouts with his equals of the neighboring 
villages; and, finally — -just as any clever, country lad, 
who had made his fellows merry with mock eulogies 
over the calves he slaughtered might and probably 
would do to-day, and which is precisely what bis 
earliest and, therefore, safest biographer, Rowe, asserts 
that he did do — wound up with following a company 
of strolling players to the metropolis; where he began 
bis prosperous career by holding gentlemen's horses 
at the theater door, while the gentlemen themselves 
went inside to witness the performance. We turn to 
the stories of the poaching, the deer-shooting, and the 
beer-drinking, with relief. It is pleasant to think 
that the pennywise old man was — at least in his 
youth — human. A little poaching and a little beer do 
nobody any harm, and it is, at all events, more cheerful 
reading than the record of a parsimonious freeholder 
taking the law of his poorer neighbor who defaults 
in the payment of a few shillings for a handful of 
malt. 



52 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

There is a village school in Stratford, and Mr. De- 
Quincy, and all his predecessors and successors who 
have preferred to construct pretty romances, and call 
them "lives of William Shakespeare," rather than to 
accept his known and recorded youth, boldly unite 
in making their hero attend its sessions. Their asser- 
tions are bravely seconded by the cicerones and local 
guides of Stratford, who, for a sixpence, will show 
you the identical desk which Shakespeare, the lad, oc- 
cupied at that grammar school; and at Shottery, the 
same guides show us the chair in which our hero sat 
while courting Mistress Anne; just as, in Wittem- 
burg, these same gentry point out the house where 
Hamlet lived when a student in the University there; 
or, in Scotland, the spot where Fitz-James and Rode- 
rick Dhu fought. But, William could not have at- 
tended this school very perseveringly, since he turns 
up in London at about the age that country lads first 
go to school. In London, he seems to have risen 
from nothing at all to the position (such as it is) of 
co-manager, along with a dozen others, of a theater. 
Here, just as young lords and swells take theater 
managers into their acquaintance to-day, he became 
intimate with greater men than himself, and so en- 
larged his skirts and his patronage, as it was the part 
of a thrifty man to do. At this time there were no 
circulating libraries in London, no libraries, accessible 
to the general public, of any sort, in fact; no book- 
sellers at every corner, no magazines or reviews; no 
public educators, and no schools or colleges swarming 
with needy students; even the literature of the age 
w r as a bound-up book to all except professional 
readers. But, for all that, this William Shakes- 



PART I. — THE MYSTERY. 53 

peare — this vagrom runaway youth, who, after a 
term at Stratford school (admitting that he went 
where the romancers put him), cuts off to London at 
the heels of a crew of strolling players — who begins 
business for himself somewhere (perhaps as "link- 
boy" at a theater door, but we may be sure, at an 
humble end of some employment) and, by saving his 
pence, works up to be actually a part- proprietor in 
two theaters, and ultimately a rich man — begins to 
possess himself of a lore and knowledge of the Past 
which, even to-day, with all our libraries, lyceums, 
serials, and booksellers, it would need a lifetime to 
acquire. 

He did the work of a lifetime. Like Mr. Stewart, 
in "Hew York, he began penniless, and by vigilance, 
shrewdness, and economy, rose to respectability, afflu- 
ence, and fortune. 

But, as we could not imagine Mr. Stewart, gentle- 
man as he was, writing all the tags and labels on his 
goods or making with his own hand every pen-stroke 
necessary in the carrying on of his immense trade; or 
poems or philosophical essays on the manufacture of 
the silks and linens and cottons he handled while slow- 
ly coining his fortune, and revolving poetry in his over- 
worked brain while overseeing the business that was 
evolving that fortune; so do we fail to conceive of 
William Shakespeare doing all the pen-work on the 
dramas he coins his money by producing on his boards. 
How much less can we conceive of this man compos- 
ing, not only poems of his own, but a Literature of his 
own — drawing his material from the classic writers 
(and notably from those Greek plays not at that time 
translated, and only accessible in the originals and in 



54 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

manuscript), from legal works, " caviare to the gene- 
ral," from philosophical treatises not known to have 
been available even for reference; writing of the cir- 
culation of the blood in the human system — a fact not 
discovered until years after his own death ! Let us 
find him, too, setting down, in writing, epitomes of all 
known wisdom; ascertaining the past, prophesying of 
the future ; laying down off-hand the philosopher's, the 
lawyer's, the leech's, the soldier's, the scholar's craft 
and art, which only these themselves, by long years of 
study, might attain to — and all this while coining a 
fortune in the management of two theaters; to have 
solved, in short, the riddle of the sphinx and all the 
as yet unspinning whirligigs of time ! Verily, a greater 
riddle than the sphinx's is this the riddle of the boy 
— Master Shakespeare. Thomas Chatterton found his 
wealth in a musty chest in an old muniment room. 
But here the chest and muninent room were not in ex- 
istence till years after the boy Shakespeare has been 
a man, and traveled on to his grave. It is no solution 
of this riddle to say the lad was a genius, and that 
genius is that which soars, while education plods. 1 
Genius itself can not account for the Shakespearean 
plays. Genius may portray, but here is a genius that 
not only portrayed that which after his death became 
fact, but related other facts which men had forgotten; 
the actors in which had lain in the dust for centuries, 
and whose records had slept sealed in dead languages, 
in manuscripts beyond his reach ! Genius, intuition, 

1 This class of evidence can not be recapitulated in the space 
of a foot note, but the curious reader will do well to refer to the 
chapter on the attainments of the author of Shakespeare, at pages 
56-65 Holmes's "Authorship of Shakespeare," third edition. 



PART I. — THE MYSTERY. 55 

is beyond education indeed. It may prophesy of the 
future or conceive of the eternal ; but only knowledge 
can draw record of the past. If the author of Shakes- 
peare had been a genius only, his " Julius Caesar" 
might have been a masterpiece of tragedy, or pathos, 
or of rage ; but it would have portrayed an ideal Rome, 
not the real one. His "Comedy of Errors" might 
have been matchless in humor and sparkling in con- 
tretemps, but, three years afterward, on translating a 
hidden manuscript of Plautus, the comedies would 
not have been found quite identical in argument. 1 

The precocity of a child may be intuitive. But no 
babe learns its alphabet spontaneously or by means of 
its genius; but out of a book, because the characters 
are arbitrary.' Pascal, when a child, discovered the 
eternal principles of geometry, and marked them out 
in chalk upon the floor; but he did not know that the 
curved figures he drew were called " circles," or that 
the straight ones were called "lines;" so he named 
them." rounds" and "bars." He discovered what 
was immutable and could be found by the searcher, 
but his genius could not reinvent arbitrary language 
that bad been invented before his birth. In short, to 
have possessed and to have written down, in advance, 
the learning and philosophy of three centuries to come, 

1 Viz : with the Mensechmi of Plautus, In "Pericles," allusion is 
made to a custom obtaining among a certain undiscussable class 
of Cyprians, which it is fair to say could not be found mentioned 
in a dozen books of which we know the names to-day, andwhich, 
from its very nature, is treated of in no encyclopaedia or manual 
of information, or of popular antiquities. How could any one 
but an antiquarian scholar, in those days, have possessed himself 
— not in this alone, but in a thousand similar instances — of such 
minute, accurate, and occult information? 



56 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

might have been the gift of Prophecy (such a gift as 
has ere this fallen from we know not where upon the 
sons of men) descending into the soul of a conceivable 
genius. But who can tell of more than he knows? Sec- 
ond sight is not retrospective. And to have testified 
of the forgotten past, without access to its record, was 
as beyond the possibilities of genius as the glowing 
wealth of the Shakespearean page is above the crea- 
tion of an unlettered man of business in the age of 
Elizabeth or of Victoria. 

Here is the dilemma with which the Shakespear- 
eans struggle: that in those years the man William 
Shakespeare did live, and was a theatrical manager 
and actor in London; and precisely the same evi- 
dence which convinces us that this man did live in 
those clays, convinces the world to-day — or must con- 
vince it", if it will only consent to look at it — that the 
dramas we call Shakespearean were so called because 
they were first published from the stage of William 
Shakespeare's theaters in London, just as we call cer- 
tain readings of the classics the"Delphin classics," 
because brought together for a Dauphin of France; 
or certain paintings " Dlisseldorf paintings," because 
produced in the Dlisseldorf school. If, however, in 
the course of ages it should come to be believed that 
the Dauphin wrote the classics, or that a man named 
Dlisseldorf painted the pictures, even then the time 
would come to set the world right. If there had been no 
Dauphin and no Dlisseldorf, we might have assigned 
those names to a power which might have produced 
the poems or the pictures. If there had been no 
William Shakespeare, we might easily have idealized 
one who could have written the plays. But, unhap- 



PART I. — THE MYSTERY. 67 

pily, there was the actual, living, breathing man in 
possession of that name, who declines to assign it to 
another, and who is any thing but the sort of man the 
Shakespeareans want. Aud, moreover, once the pre- 
sumption is waived and the question is opened again; 
there is a mass of evidence in the possession of this 
century, which, taken piecemeal, can be separately 
waived aside, but which, when cumulated and heaped 
together, is a mountain over which the airiest skeptic 
can not vault. 

But did none of "William Shakespeare's contempor- 
aries suspect the harmless deception ? There is no 
proof at hand, nor any evidence at all positive, that 
the intimates of the manager understood him to be, or 
to have ever pretended to have been, the original 
author of the text of the plays he gave to his players. 
Let us hasten to do William Shakespeare the justice 
to say that we can find nowhere any testimony to his 
having asserted a falsehood. But, if he did so pretend 
tohisintim ites, and if the dramas we now call" Shakes- 
pearean" were actually produced, in those days, on 
William Shakespeare's own stage, under that preten- 
sion, certainly some of them must have wagged their 
heads in secret. Surely, Ben Johnson, who bears 
testimony that his friend Shakespeare had " small 
Latin and less Greek," must have queried a little within 
himself as to where certain things he read in the text 
of his friend's plays came from, always supposing that 
he did not know perfectly well where they did come 
from. It seems more than probable, as we have al- 
ready said, that, whoever suspected or knew the source 
of the plays, and who also knew, if such was the fact, 
that they were claimed as Shakespeare's compositions 



58 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

— had more cue to wink at than to expose the "hum- 
bug. We find, indeed, that one, Robert Greene, by 
name, did protest against " an upstart crow, beautified 
with our feathers," (i. e. a borrower and adapter of 
other men's work, pretending to be a dramatist when 
he was not), "that, with his tygres heart wrapt in a 
player's hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast 
out a blank verse as the best of you ; and, beeing an 
absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his owne conceyt the 
only Shake-scene in a countrey." That is to say, in 
language more intelligible at this day, that, being a 
sort of Jack-of- all-trades around the theater — holding 
horses, taking tickets, acting a little, putting pieces on 
the stage, and writing out their parts for the actors — 
he (Shakespeare) came in time to consider himself 
a dramatist, a manager, and a tragedian, all in one. 
Doubtless Greene was inspired by jealousy— for he 
was a writer of plays for the stage himself — in mak- 
ing and publishing this sneer. But, as he was en- 
deavoring to make his remarks so personal to Shakes- 
peare as to be readily recognized, he would not have 
alluded to him except by some well-known character- 
istic. So he calls him a " Jack- of- all-trades," that is, 
a man who did a little of every thing. Is a Jack- of- 
all-trades about a theater the ideal poet, philosopher, 
and seer, who wrote the Shakespearean drama — the 
ideal of the Shakespeareans? 

According to the chronicles and the record, then, 
one William Shakespeare, a " general utility " actor, 
and Johannes Factotum, lived and thrived in London, 
some two hundred and fifty odd years ago. At about 
that date a book is likewise written. Who are these 
who find this book, and make this man to fit it? 



PART I. — THE MYSTERY. 59 

To have written that book one must have been a 
philosopher, a poet, a lawyer, a leech, a naturalist, a 
traveler, a student of bible history! At the same 
time this book — in portions— is making its appear- 
ance, there are two men living, each of whom is 
all these. One of them is known to have studied 
the bible — not what we understand to-day by a 
"current work" (as the New Testament revision of 
1881 is "current " as we write these lines) until 1611, 
when the King James version is printed. 1 Together, 
these two men possess in themselves about all of their 
age with which subsequent ages care to connect them- 
selves. But it is not suggested that these two men, 
Bacon and Raleigh, might have written the book for 
which an author is wanted. 

Must the man that wrote the dramas have visited 
Italy? Mr. Halliwell and others, inform us of Shakes- 
peare's visit to Verona, Venice, and Florence. Must 
Shakespeare have been at the bar? My Lord Camp- 
bell writes us a book to show his familiarity with the 
science of jurisprudence. That book has traveled far 
upon a lordly name. Later explorations in the same 
Held — while sustaining his lordship's conclusions — 
have doubted whether the passages in these dramas, 
which stamp their author's knowledge of the com- 
mon law, are the ones over which Lord Campbell re- 

1 Up to 1611 (the year in which he is claimed to have ceased 
writing plays), the Geneva bible was the only one within Wil- 
liam Shakespeare's reach. — ("An Attempt to Discover which 
version of the Bible was that ordinarily used by Shakespeare. 
J. 0. Halliwell Phillipps. London, 1867. Only ten copies 
printed.") But Bishop Wadsworth, Mr. Rees, and the other gen- 
tlemen who find parallelisms between passages in the dramas 
and the King James version, pay very little attention to dates. 



60 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

lapses into ecstasy). Must Shakespeare have been a 
physician? There have not been wanting the books 
to prove him that. 1 And, crowning this long misrule 
of absurdity, comes an authority out of Philadelphia, 
to assure us that the youth Shakespeare, on quitting 
his virgin Stratford for the metropolis, was scrupulous 
to avoid the glittering temptations of London; that 
he eschewed wine and women; that he avoided the 
paths of vice and immorality, and piously kept him- 
self at home, his only companion being the family 
Bible, which he read most ardently and vigorously! 2 
It is to be hoped, for charity's sweet sake, that his 
latest authority has truth for his color and testimony 

111 The Medical Acquirement of Shakespeare." By C. W. 
Stearns, M. D. New York, 1865. Shakespeare's Medical Knowl- 
edge. By Dr. Bucknill. London. I860. 

2 " Shakespeare and the Bible." By John Rees, etc., etc. Phil- 
adelphia: Claxton, Remsen & IJaffelfinger, 1876. 

We commend to readers of these pages this latest authority, 
and can not forbear noting a few of his " discoveries." Mr. 
Rees has found out (p. 37) not only that William Shakespeare 
wrote the lines — 

" Not a hair perished, 



On their sustaining garments not a blemish, 
But fresher than before." ("The Tempest," i. 2) 

But that he took them from Acts xxvii. 34: 

There shall not a hair fall from the head of any of you. 

In which the parallelism is in the word hair ! ! I 
Or, again (p. 36) that the lines : 

Though they are of monstrous shape, . . . 
Their manners are more gentle, kind, than of 
Our human generation you shall find 
Many, nay, almost any ("The Tempest," iii. 3), 



PART I. — THE MYSTERY. 61 

for his oil. The picture has at least the freshness and 
charm of utter novelty ! 

The work of Shakespeare-making goes on. The 
facts are of record. We may run as we read them ! 
But rather let us, out of reverence for the errors of 
our fathers, refuse to read at all, and accept the 
ideal of Malone, of Halliwell and De Quincy, of 
Grant White, and of ten thousand more, who prefer 
to write their biographies of William Shakespeare, 
not in the first person, like Baron Miinchhausen, nor 
in the second person, like the memoirs of Sully, but 
in the probable and supposititious person of "it is 
possible he did this" and " it is likely he did that." 

Let those who will, disparage the boy and man 
William Shakespeare, who married and made an hon- 
est woman of Anne Hathaway of Shottery ; left home 
to earn his own living rather than be a drain on the 
slender household store ; used his first wealth to make 
a gentleman of his father; and who, with what fol- 
lowed, purchased himself a home on his boyhood's 

are taken from the following: 

In the same quarters were possessions of the chief man of the island, 
whose name was Publius ; who received us, and lodged us three days court- 
eously, . . . who also honored us with many honors ; and when we de- 
parted, they laded us with such things as were necessary. — (Acts xxviii. 7-10. 

In which — unless it be in the fact that one of these passages is 
in an act and the other in Acts — the reader must find the par- 
allelism for himself, without assistance from Mr. Kees. 

Shakespeare, Mr. Kees tells us, never neglected his Bible, be- 
cause (p. 28) " he was indebted to one whose love added a bright 
charm to the holy passages she taught him to read and study — 
to his mother was Shakespeare indebted for early lessons of 
piety, and a reverence for a book from whose passages in after- 
life he wove himself a mantle of undying fame!" 



62 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

banks, where — " procul negotiis" — in the evening of 
life he might enjoy the well-won fruits of early toil. 
But that he ever claimed, much less wrote, what we 
call the Shakespearean drama, let those bring proof 
who can. 



PART II. — THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 63 



PART II. 

THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 




UT, having taken the liberty of doubting 
whether — as matter of record — one William 
Shakespeare, of Stratford town, in England, 
sometime part-proprietor of the Globe and 
Blackfriars Theaters in London, could have very well 
been himself and the author of what are known popu- 
larly to-day as "the plays of Shakespeare," although 
there seemed to be ground for supposing that he might 
have cast them into something of the acting form 
they possess as preserved to us; and having come to 
the conclusion that — once this presumption is lifted — 
all the evidence procurable as to the life and times of 
the actual William Shakespeare is actually evidence 
cumulative to the truth of the proposition as to the 
record: let us proceed to inquire whether — on re- 
view — a case rested on this evidence can be rebutted 
by those certain considerations and matters, by way 
of rejoinder, which are stereotype and safe to come to 
the surface whenever these waters are troubled — 
which whoever ventures to canvass the possibilities of 
an extra Shakesperean authorship of the dramas 
can so infallibly anticipate. 

Granted that the Shakespeare Will does not prove the 
testator oblivious of his own copyrights or rights in 
the nature of copyrights ; granted that the story of the 
deer-stealing was actual invention and not merely 



64 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

rejected by the Shakespereans, because conceived to be 
unworthy of the image they set up ; granted that the 
fact of the circulation of the blood was a familiar 
fact in the days of William Shakespeare; that the 
"Mensechmi" of Plautus; that Iago's speech in 
"Othello" and the stanza of* Berni's Orlando Innamorato 
were mere coincidences ; or, better yet, admit that there 
was an English version of the Italian poem in Shakes- 
peare's day 1 — admit, if required — that the "Hamlet" 
of Saxo, had been translated ; 2 that the law in " The 

1 When Iago utters the often quoted lines, "who steals my 
purse steals trash, etc.," he but repeats, with little variation, 
this stanza of the Orlando Innamorato of which poem, to this day, 
there is no English version. 

" Chi ruba un corno nn cavallo, un anello 
E simil cose, ha qualcha discrezione, 
E patrebbe chimarsi ladroncello ; 
Ma quel che ruba la reputazione 
E de l'altrai patiche si fa bello, 
Si puo chiamare assassino e ladrone ; 

E tanto piu del dover trapassa il segno ? " 

As no English translation has been made of the Orlando 
Innamorato, I must ask the reader who can not command the 
original to be content with this rendering of the above stanza: 

" The man who steals a horn, a horse, a ring, 

Or such a trifle, thieves with moderation, 
And may be justly called a robberling ; 

But he who takes away a reputation 
And pranks in feathers from another's wing 

His deed is robbery — assassination, 
And merits punishment so much the greater 

As he to right and truth is more a traitor." 

Shakespeare, by R. Gr. White, vol. I, p. 23. 

2 Saxo Grammaticus, the Danish historian from whom the 
plot of the " Hamlet" was taken, Whalley says, writing in 1748, 
that " no translation hath yet been made," must have been read 
by the writer of " Hamlet" in the original. "An Enquiry into 
the Learning of Shakespeare," etc. By Peter Whalley, A. B. t 



PART II. — THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 65 

Merchant of Venice" was "Venetian" instead of 
"crowner's quest" law; admit that "William Shakes- 
peare "had the advantages in school of something 
more than the mere rudiments of learning;" admit 
that " his devotion to his family drove him forth from 
the rural seclusion of Stratford into the battle of the 
great world ; " that the immortal gift of the second- 
best bed was, (we quote from Mr. Grant White, who 
is apparently willing to sacrifice anybody's reputation 
if he can thereby prove his William to have been a 
prodigy of virtue no less than of genius), explained by 
the fact that, at the time of the hurried marriage, 
a husband had to be provided for Mistress Hathaway 
without loss of time, and that little Susannah was as 
much of a surprise to William as to any body — in 
other words, that Anne was " no better than she 
should be," (oblivious of the fact that "the prema- 
ture Susannah" was William Shakespeare's favorite 
child; that he, at least, never doubted her paternity, 
for he left her the bulk of his fortune in his will); or 
even that — according to Steevens, that testamentary 
second thought was actually " a mark of rare confi- 
dence and devotion ;" granted all these — if they have 
anything to do with the question — and a dozen more, 
and we only attenuate, by the exact value of these, 

Fellow of St. John's College, London. Printed for J. Waller at 
the Crown and Mitre, 1748 — And see a suggestion that the 
"Hamlet" came from Germany, in a pamphlet "On the Double 
Personality of the Hamlet of Saxo Grammaticus, the Hamlet of 
Shakespeare. Its Relation to the German Hamlet." By Dr. 
Latham, Royal Society of Literature Transactions. 1878. Also, 
" Shakespeare in Germany. Alfred Cohn. Berlin and London. 
1874. 

6 



66 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

the mountain of probability, nothing less than the 
complete dilapidation and disappearance of which 
could leave room for substitution, in the stead of the 
probability, the possibility of such a suspension of the 
laws of nature as is required by the Shakespearean 
theorists. For, as we have said, the evidence is 
cumulative, and, therefore, no more to be waived or 
disposed of by doubts as to, or even the dispelment 
of, this or that or the other item — or disintegration of 
this or that or the other block — of evidence than the 
Coliseum has been wiped away and disposed of 
because its coping has crumbled, or because, for some 
centuries, the petty Roman princes built their palaces 
from its debris. 

And we may as well remark that, just here, it is 
always in order to mention Archbishop Whately's 
" Historic Doubts." We wish some of the gentlemen 
who cite it so glibly, would take the trouble to read 
that clever little book. It is a logical, not a whim- 
sical effort. It was intended by its author as an 
answer to " Hume's Essay on Miracles." Hume's ar- 
gument being, in the opinion of the Archbishop, 
reducible to the proposition that miracles were impos- 
sible because they were improbable, his lordship wrote 
his little work to show that the history of Napoleon 
was actually most improbable, and, written of feigned 
characters, would read like the most extravagant 
fable. Surely it can not be necessary to reiterate the 
difference between the Archbishop's brochure and the 
proposition of " The Shakspearean Myth ! " The 
one was the argument from improbability, applied to 
facts in order to show its dangerous and altogether 
vicious character. The other is the demonstration 



PART II. — THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 67 

that history — that the record — when consulted, is di- 
rectly fatal to a popular impression, and directly con- 
tradictory of a presumption, horn of mere carelessness 
and accident, and allowed to gather weight hy mere 
years and lapse of time. 

But, for the sake of the argument, let us leave the 
discussion, for the moment, just where it stands, and 
take still bolder ground. Instead of sifting evidence 
and counting witnesses, let us assume that, w T hen we 
painted William Shakspeare — who lived between the 
years 1564 and 1616 — as an easy-going rural wag, 
with a rural w T it, thereafter to be sharpened by 
catering to the "gods" of a city theater; a poacher 
on occasion, and scapegrace generally in his youth, 
who chose the life of " a vagabond by statute " — 
i. e. a strolling player — but who turned up in Lon- 
don, and found his way into more profitable con- 
nection with a permanent play-house; and, in his 
advancing years, became thrifty, finally sordid — we 
had only taken the liberty of conceiving, like 
every other who ever wrote on a Shakespearean 
theme, yet one more William Shakespeare ; so that, 
instead of ten thousand William Shakespeares, no 
two of which were identical, there were now ten 
thousand and one ! Admitting that, the next question 
would of necessity be — and such an investigation as 
the present must become utterly valueless if prose- 
cuted with bias or with substitution of personal opin- 
ion for historical fact — whose William Shakespeare is 
probably most a likeness of the true William Shakes- 
peare, who did wander from Stratford to London, 
who did sojourn there, and who did wander back 



68 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

again to Stratford, and there was gathered to his 
fathers, in the year 1616? 

The popular William Shakespeare, built to fit the 
plays, is a masterless philosopher, a matchless poet, a 
student of Greek manuscripts and classic manners, of 
southern romance and northern sagas, a traveler and 
a citizen of the world, a scientist, a moralist, a master 
of statecraft, and skilled in all the graces and ameni- 
ties of courtly society ! Which of these two portraits 
is nearest to the life? Let us take an appeal to His- 
tory. 

There appears to be but one way to go about to dis- 
cover; that way is to appeal to the truth of history; 
to go as nearly back as we can get to the lifetime of 
the actual man we are after, and inquire, wherever a 
trace of him can be touched, what manner of man he 
was. Now, it happens that the very nearest we can 
come to an eye-witness as to the personnel of William 
Shakespeare is the Reverend John Ward, Vicar of 
Stratford, who wrote in that town a diary or memo- 
randa, between February, 1662, and April, 1663, say 
forty-seven years after William Shakespeare's death. 
The following meager references to his late fellow- 
townsman are all (except an entry to the effect that he 
had two daughters, etc. ; and another memorandum, 
" Remember to peruse Shakespeare's plays, etc.,) 
thought worth while by Dominie Ward, viz : 

" I have heard that Mr. Shakespeare was a natural 
wit, without any art at all; he frequented the plays 
all his younger time, but in his elder days he lived at 
Stratford, and supplied the stage with two plays every 
year, and for that he had an allowance so large that 



* PART II. THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 69 

he spent at the rate of £1,000 a year, as I have heard." 

"Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson had a 
merrie meeting, and, it seems, drank too hard, for 
Shakespeare died of a feaver there contracted." 

Next, chronologically, we come to a gentleman 
named Aubrey. This Mr. Aubrey was himself a na- 
tive of Warwickshire; was born in 1627 — that is, 
eleven years after Shakespeare died. He entered gen- 
tleman commoner of Trinity College, Oxford, and so, 
presumably, was no Puritan. He was considerable of 
a scholar himself, and was esteemed, we are told, 
a Latin poet of no mean abilities. He was admitted 
a barrister of the Inner Temple in 1616; and so, a 
scholar, a poet, and a lawyer, might presumably know 
the difference between a wag and a genius. His man- 
uscripts are preserved in the Ashmolean Museum. 
He gives an account of his fellow-countyman, and, 
coming as it does, next to Dominie Ward's, nearer to 
the lifetime of William Shakespeare than any chronicle 
extant, (Malone admits it was not written later than 
1680), we give it entire : 

"Mr. William Shakespeare was born at Stratford- 
upon-Avon, in the county of Warwick. His father 
was a butcher, and I have been told heretofore by 
some of his neighbours that, when he was a boy, he 
exercised his father's trade; but when he killed a calfe 
he would doe it in a high style, and make a speech. 
There was, at this time, another butcher's son in that 
towne, that was held not at all inferior to him for a 
natural witt, his acquaintance and coetanean, but died 
young. This Win. being inclined naturally to poetry 
and acting, came to London, I guess about eighteen, 



70 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH 

and was an actor at one of the play-houses, and did 
act exceedingly well. (Now B. Jonson never was a 
good actor, but an excellent instructor.) He began 
early to make essays at dramatic poetry, which at 
that time was very lowe, and his plays took well. He 
was a handsome, well-shaped man, very good com- 
pany, and of a verie redie and pleasant smooth witt. 
The humour of the Constable in <A Midsummer 
Night's Dream,' he happened to take at Grendon, in 
Bucks, 1 which is the road from London to Stratford, 
and there was living that Constable, about 1642, 
when I first came to Oxon. Mr. Jos. Howe is of that 
parish, and knew him. Ben Jonson and he did gather 
humours of men dayly, wherever they came. One 
time, as he was at Stratford-upon-Avon, one Combes, 
an old rich usurer, was to be buryed; he makes there 
this extemporary epitaph : 

Ten in the hundred the Devil allows, 
But Combes will have twelve, he swears and vows. 
If any one asks who lies in this tomb, 
" Hoh," quoth the Devil, " 'tis my John a Combe ! " 

He was wont to go to his native country once a 
year. I think I have been told that he left £200 or 
£300 a year, or thereabouts, to a sister. I have heard 
Sir William Davenant and Mr. Thomas Shad well (who 
is counted the best comedian we have now) say that he 
had a most prodigious witt, and did admire his natural 
parts beyond all other dramaticall writers. He was 

'Aubrey says, in a note at this place: " I think it was a mid- 
summer's night that he happened there. But there is no Con- 
stable in 'Midsummer Night's Dream.'" Aubrey probably in- 
tended reference to Dogberry, in the " Much Ado." 



PART II. — THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 71 

wont to say that he never blotted out a line in his life ; 
says Ben Jonson, ' I wish he had blotted out a thou- 
sand.' His comedies will remain witt as long as the 
English tongue is understood, for that he handles 
mores hominum: Now our present writers reflect much 
upon particular persons and coxcombites that twenty 
years hence they will not be understood. Though, as 
Ben Jonson says of him, that he had but little Latin 
and less Greek, he understood Latin pretty well, for 
he had been, in his younger days, a school-master in 
the country." 1 

Imagine this as the record of a real "Shakespeare ! " 
Could we imagine it as the record of a Milton ? Let 
us conceive of a fellow-countryman of John Milton's, 
a college-bred man and a Latin poet, saying of the au- 
thor of " Paradise Lost ; " " He was a goodish-looking 
sort of man, wore his hair long, was a clerk, or secre- 
tary, or something to Cromwell, or some of his gang ; 
had some trouble with his wife ; was blind, as I have 
heard ; or, perhaps, it was deaf he was." And con- 
ceive of this, a few years after Milton's death being 

1 Aubrey's MSS. was called " Minutes of Lives," and was ad- 
dressed to his " worthy friend Mr. Anthony Wood, Antiquary of 
Oxford." A letter to Wood, dated June 15, 1680, accompanied it, 
in which Aubrey says : " 'T is a task that I never thought to have 
undertaken till you imposed it upon me, saying that I was fit for 
it by reason of my general acquaintance, having now not only 
lived above half a century of years in the world, but have also 
been much tumbled up and down in it, which hath made me so 
well known. Besides the modern advantage of coffee-houses, 
before which men knew not how to be acquainted but with their 
own relations or societies, I might add that I come of a long- 
aevious race, by which means I have wiped some feathers off the 
wings of time for several generations, which does reach high." 



72 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

actually all the information accessible concerning 
him! 

But to continue our search in the vicinage. On the 
10th day of April, 1693 (thirteen years later), a visitor 
to Warwickshire wrote a letter to his cousin, describ- 
ing, among other points of interest, the village and 
church of Stratford-upon-Avon. And, as the letter 
was discovered among the papers of a well-known 
nobleman, addressed to a person known to have lived, 
and indorsed by this latter, " From Mr. Dowdall ; de- 
scription of several places in Warwickshire " — as it 
bears on its face evidence of its genuineness, and, above 
all, mentions William Shakespeare, precisely in the 
same strain j;hat it alludes to other worthies of the 
county — the Beauchamps, the Nevilles, etc. — it has al- 
ways been accepted as authentic. After a description 
of the tomb and resting place of " our English trage- 
dian, Mr. Shakespeare," the writer continues: 

"The clerk that showed me this church was above 
eighty years old. 1 He says that this Shakespeare was 
formerly of this town, bound apprentice to a butcher; 
but that he ran from his master to London, and there 

1 I.e. (more than "above" three years old when s. died.) This 
letter was among the papers of Lord DeClifFord, which were sold 
by auction — and was purchased by Mr. Rodd, a well-known anti- 
quarian bookseller, of Great Newport Street, London, in 1834. 
Mr. Rodd printed it in pamphlet form in 1838 (at least the copy 
we have bears imprint of that year). It is dated " Butlers Mer- 
ston in Warwickshire, April, the 10th, 1693;" is signed, "Your 
very faithful kinsman and most aff'te humble serv't till death, 
John at Stiles," and is addressed, "These for Mr. Southwell, pr. 
serv't." This is Mr. Edward Southwell, and the letter is indorsed 
in his handwriting, " From Mr. Dowdall. Description of several 
places in Warwickshire." Mr. Rodd says that the writer was 
" an Inns'-of-Court-Man." 



PART II. — THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 73 

was received into the play-house as a servitour, and 
by this means had an opportunity to be what he after- 
wards proved. He was the best of his family, but the 
male line is extinguished. Not one, for fear of the 
curse abovesaid, dare touch, his gravestone, though his 
wife and daughters did earnestly desire to be laid in 
the same grave with him." 

Next, chronologically, comes the contribution pre- 
served to us by a Reverend Richard Davies, Rector of 
Sapperton, 1 in Gloucestershire. The Reverend William 
Fulman, who died in 1688, bequeathed certain of his 
biographical collections to this Reverend Davies. 
Davies died in 1708, leaving many annotations to 
his friend's manuscripts. Among these annotations 
he writes the following of William Shakespeare: 
" William Shakespeare was born at Stratford upon 
Avon, in Warwickshire, about 1563-4, much given 
to all unluckiness in stealing venison and rabbits, 
particularly from Sir Lucy, who had him oft whipt, 
and some times imprisoned, and at last made him 
fly his native country to his great advancement. 
But his revenge was so great that he is his < Justice 
Clodpate' 2 and calls him a great man, and that, in al- 
lusion to his name, bore three lowses rampant for his 
arms. From an actor he became a composer. lie died 
April 23, 1616, aetat fifty-three, probably at Stratford 
— for there he is buried, and hath a monument (Dugd. 

1 His MS. additions to the MSS. of the Eev. William Pulman 
(in which the allusion to Shakespeare is made) are all in the li- 
brary of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. 

2 Probably a reference to Justice Shallow, in " Merry "Wives of 
Windsor." 

7 



74> THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

p. 520) on which he lays a heavy curse upon any one 
who shall remove his bones. He died a papist." 

Whatever these may be worth — for, of course, like 
the rest, they are mere second-hand and hearsay — it 
is fair to include them in a collection of what the law 
calls "general reputation," "general report," or 
" common fame," and it is fair to offset this collection, 
at least, against that " common fame" and " common 
reputation" which has grown up during the last 
hundred years or so concerning William Shakespeare, 
which is so unboundedly to his glory and renown. 
Much later along, we are made acquainted, too, with 
a tradition, related by one John Jordan, a townsman 
of Stratford, (who was known in the days of Malone 
and the Ireland forgeries as " the Stratford poet,") 
who claimed to have succeeded in the line of descent 
to a tradition of an alleged drinking-bout of Shakes- 
peare and others (as representing Stratford) against 
the champions of Pebworth, Marston, Hillborough, 
Grafton, Wixford, Broom, and Bidford, in which 
William was so worsted that his legs refused to carry 
him farther homeward than a certain thorn-tree, there- 
after to come in for its share of worshipful adoration 
from the Shakespearean sticklers. But the tradition 
is of no value except as additional testimony to the 
impression of his boon companions, associates, and 
contemporaries, that William Shakespeare was a jolly 
dog who loved his frolic, his pot of ale, and his 
wench — was almost any thing, in short, except the 
student of history, antiquity, and classic manners, no 
less than the scholar of his own times, that he has 
been created since by those who knew him not. 
Nothing travels faster in rural communities, as we 



PART II. — THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 75 

have remarked, than a reputation for " book-learn- 
ing;" let us continue our search for Shakespeare's. 
When an interest in the Shakespearean drama 
began to assert itself, and people began to inquire 
who wrote it, not a step could they get beyond the 
Rev. John Ward, Richard Davies, and Aubrey. At 
the outset they ran full against this village " ne'er-do- 
weel " and rustic wag, who worked down into a man 
of thrift, made money off his theatrical shares and 
properties in London, and spent it royally in Strat- 
ford, drinking himself into his grave some seven 
'years before the first collection of what the world 
in time was to credit him with, (but improved and en- 
larged beyond what it ever was in his day) the Shakes- 
perean drama — first saw the light. Perhaps Dominie 
Ward may have been dazzled by the open house of 
the richest man in town. A thousand pounds a year 
is an income very rarely enjoyed by poets, and, we 
think, more easily accounted for by interests in tithes 
and outlying lands in Stratford, than by the " two 
plays a year," in and about the days when from four 
to eight pounds was the price of an acting play (ac- 
cording to Philip Henslow, a sort of stage pawnbroker 
and padrone of those days, who kept many actors in 
his pay, and whose diary or cash book, in which he 
entered his disbursements and receipts, is still extant), 
and twenty pounds a sum commanded only by masters. 
The prodigality which dazed the simple Stratford 
dominie was easily paid for, no doubt, by something 
less than the income named; and such an income, too, 
would tally with William Shakespeare's own estimate 
of his wordly goods in his Will. 

But the statement is the nearest and best evidence 



76 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

we have at hand, and so let it be accepted. And so, 
running up against this William Shakespeare, these 
commentators were obliged to stop. But there were 
the dramas, and there was the name " William Shakes- 
peare " tacked to them ; it was William Shakespeare 
they were searching for; and, since the William 
Shakespeare they had found, was evidently not the 
one they wanted, they straightway began to construct 
one more suitable. The marvelous silence of history 
and local tradition only stimulated them, They must 
either confess that there was no such man, or make 
one; they preferred to make one. 

First (for Howe has only — in his eight honest pages 
of biographical notice — narrated certain gossip or 
facts, on the authority, perhaps, of Betterton, and 
does not claim to be an explorer, and Heminges and 
Con dell, who edited the first folio, made no biographical 
allusion whatever) came Edmund Malone. With the 
nicest and most painstaking care he sifted every 
morsel and grain of testimony, overturned histories, 
chronicles, itineraries, local tradition, and report — 
but in vain. The nearer he came to the Stratford 
" Shaughraun," the further away he got from a match- 
less poet and an all-mastering student. But, like those 
that were to come after him, instead of accepting the 
situation, and confessing the William Shakespeare who 
lived at Stratford not mentionable in the same breath 
with the producer of the august text which had in- 
spired his search, he preferred to rail and marvel at 
the stupidity of the neighborhood, and the sins of the 
chroniclers who could so overlook prodigies. Far 
from concluding that — because he finds no such name 
as William Shakespeare in the national Walhalla — 



PART II. — THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 77 

therefore no such name belonged there, he assumes, 
rather, that the Walhalla builders do not understand 
their business. He says : 

" That almost a century should have elapsed from 
the time of his [William Shakespeare's] death, with- 
out a single attempt having been made to discover 
any circumstance which could throw a light on the 
history of his life or literary career, . . are circum- 
stances which can not be contemplated without 
astonishment. 1 . . Sir William Dugdale, born in 
1605, and educated at the school of Coventry, twenty 
miles from Stratford-upon-Avon, and whose work, 
< The Antiquities of Warwickshire,' appeared in 
1646, only thirty years after the death of our poet, 
we might have expected to give some curious memo- 
rials of his illustrious countryman. But he has not 
given us a single particular of his private life, con- 
tenting himself with, a very slight mention of him in 
his account of the church and tombs of Stratford- 
upon-Avon. The next biographical printed notice 
that I have found is in Fuller's ' Worthies,' folio, 
1662; in ' Warwickshire,' page 116 — where there is 
a short account of our poet, furnishing very little 
information concerning him. And again, neither 
Winstanley, in his 'Lives of the Poets,' 8vo, 16875 
Langbaine in 1691; Blount in 1694; Gibbon in 
1699— add anything to the meager accounts of Dug- 
dale and Fuller. That Anthony Wood, who was 
himself a native of Oxford, and was born but four- 
teen years after the death of our author, should not 

^lalone's "Life:" "Plays and Poems," Loudon, 1821, vol. ii, 
p. 4. 
2 Ibid., p. 5. 



78 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

have collected any anecdotes of Shakespeare, has 
always appeared to me extraordinary. Though 
Shakespeare has no direct title to a place in the 
'Athense Oxoniensis/ that diligent antiquary could 
easily have found a niche for his life as he has done 
for many others not bred at Oxford. The Life of 
Davenant afforded him a very fair opportunity for 
such an insertion." 

The difficulty was, that Mr. Malone was searching 
among the poets for one by the name of "William 
Shakespeare, when there was no such name among 
the poets. He found him not, because he was not 
there. He might with as much propriety have 
searched for the name of Grimaldi in the Poets' 
Corner, or for Homer's on the books of the "Worship- 
ful Society of Patten-makers. To be sure, in 
writing up Stratford Church, Sir William Dugdale 
can not very well omit mention of the tomb of Shakes- 
peare, any more than a writer who should set out to 
make a guide-book of Westminster Abbey could 
omit description of the magnificent tomb of John 
Smith. But in neither the case of Dugdale nor in 
that of the cicerone of the Abbey is the merit of the 
tomb a warrant for the immortality of the entombed. 
It is, possibly, worth our while to pause just here, 
and contemplate the anomaly the Shakespeareans 
would have us accept — would have us to swallow, or 
rather bolt, with our eyes shut — namely, the spectacle 
(to mix the metaphor) of the mightiest genius the 
world has ever borne upon its surface, living utterly 
unappreciated and unsuspected, going in and out 
among his fellows in a crowded city of some two 
hundred thousand inhabitants, among whom were 



PART II. — THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 79 

certain master spirits whose history we have intact 
to-day, and whose record we can possess ourselves of 
with no difficulty — without making any impression 
on them, or imprint on the chronicles of the time, 
except as a clever fellow, a fair actor (with a knack, 
besides, at a little of every thing), so that in a dozen 
years he is forgotten as if he had never been ; and — 
except that a tourist, stumbling upon a village 
church, finds his name on a stone — passed beyond 
the memory of a man in less than the years of a 
babe ! The blind old Homer at least was known as 
a poet where he was known at all; the seven cities 
which competed for the tradition of his birth when 
criticism revealed the merit of his song — though he 
might have begged his bread in their streets — at 
least did not take him for a tinker ! It is not that 
the Shakespearean dramas were not recognized as 
immortal by the generation of their composer that is 
the miracle ; neither were the songs of Homer. Per- 
haps, so far as experience goes, this is rather the rule 
than the exception. The miracle is, that in all the 
world of London and of England nobody knew that 
there was any Shakespeare, in the very days when 
the Drama we hold so priceless now was being pub- 
licly rendered in a play-house, and printed — as we 
shall come to consider further on — for the benefit of 
non-theater-goers ! 

But, it is said, the fire that destroyed the Globe 
Theater — and again, the great fire of London — burned 
up all personal records of the immortal Shakespeare. 
Then, again, there is the lapse of time — the ordinary 
wear and tear of centuries, and the physical changes 
of the commercial center of the world. But how 



80 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

about Edmund Spenser? That we have his poetry 
and the record of his life, is certain. Or, how about 
Chaucer? Did the great tire of London affect his 
chronicle and his labors? The records of Horace, 
and Maro, of Lucretius, of Juvenal, and Terence, had 
more than a great fire of London to contend with. 
But they have survived the ruin of empires and the 
crash of thrones, the conflagrations of libraries and 
the scraping of palimpsests. And yet the majesty and 
might of the Shakespearean page, how greater than 
Horatius or Maro, than Juvenal and Terence 1 If it 
all were a riddle, we could not read it. But it is not 
a riddle. It is the simplest of facts — the simple fact 
that the compilers of the Shakespearean pages worked 
anonymously, and concealed their identity so success- 
fully that it lay hidden for three hundred years, and 
defies even the critical acumen, the learning and the 
research of this nineteenth century. 

But to return to Edmund Malone. He is not de- 
terred by his failure to find a poet of the name of 
Shakespeare. Determined that a poet of that name 
there shall be, and not being at hand, he proceeds — 
and he has the credit of being the first to undertake 
the task — to construct an immortal bard. And a very 
pretty sort of fellow he turns out, too ! — one that, 
with such minor variations as have, from time to time, 
suggested themselves to gentlemen of a speculative 
turn of mind, has been a standard immortal William 
all along. For they who seek will find. Had Mr. 
Malone searched for the Stratford " shaughraun," who 
ran off and became an actor (as capably respectable a 
profession as any other, for the man makes the pro- 
fession, and not the profession the man) ; who re vis- 



PART tf I.— THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 81 

ited his native haunts — on the lookout, not for kings 
and cardinals, not for dukes and thanes and princes — 
bat for clowns and drunkards and misers to dove- 
tail in among the Hamlets and Othellos that passed 
under his adapting pen ; 1 had he searched for the 

1 It is as curious as suggestive to find that the prologue and 
choruses of the "Henry V." and " Henry VIII." are apologies 
for the imperfections of the plots, and the folly of the multitude 
they catered to. As to the internal testimony of the authorship 
of these compositions, any reader can judge for himself. We 
have expressed our own opinion as being that William Shakes- 
peare might be credited with the characters of Nym and Bar- 
dolph; especially of the Corporal, whose part consists of the 
phrase, "There's the humor of it," intruded at each convenient 
interval; and it is possible that Shakespeare, in fitting up the 
matter in hand, interpolated this as the reigning by-word of the 
moment. There seems to be reason for believing that this ex- 
pression did happen to be a favorite at about that time; and 
that Shakespeare was not the only one who rang the changes on 
it as a season to stage material. Witness the following: 

Cob. Nay, I have my rheum, and I can be angry as well as another, sir! 

Cash. Thy rheum, Cob ? Thy humor, thy humor! Thou mistak'st. 

Cob. Humor? Mack, I think it be so indeed! What is that humor ? Some 
rare thing, I warrant. 

Cash. Marry, I tell thee, Cob, it is a gentlemanlike monster, bred in the 
special gallantry of our time by affectation, and fed by folly. 

Cob. How must it be fed ? 

Cash. Oh, aye; humor is nothing if it be not fed. Didst thou never hear 
that? It's a common phrase, " Feed thy humor." 

Every Man in his Humor, iii. 4. 

Couldst thou not but arrive most acceptable 
Chiefly to such as had the happiness 
Daily to see how the poor innocent word 
Was racked and tortured. 

Every Man Out of his Humor. 

"Humor" was, it would seem by this, the over-used and 
abused word of these times ; just as for example " awful " might 
be said to be an over-used and abused word during our own 
times. 



82 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

Stratford butcher's son, who was the Stratford wag 
as well, and who never slaughtered a sheep with- 
out making a speech to his admiring fellow -villagers, 
here he was at his hand. But he was searching, not 
for a butcher's son, but for a poet — for a " courtier's, 
soldier's, scholar's eye, tongue, sword, 

The expectancy and rose of the fair state, 
The glass of fashion and the mold of form, 
The observed of all observers " — 

for " an amazing genius which could pervade all na- 
ture at a glance, and to whom nothing within the lim- 
its of the universe appeared to be unknown;" 1 and 
his instinct should have assured him that — however the 
works which such a genius had left behind him might 
travel under the name of the butcher's boy — it was 
not the pen of the butcher-boy that had written them ; 
that the composer of pages " from which, were all the 
arts and sciences lost, they might be recovered," 2 was 

1 Whalley. 

2 Ibid. A curious instance of this familiarity — to be found in 
the Shakespearean dramas — with the least noticed facts of 
science, and which, so far as we know, has escaped the critics, we 
might allude to here: In one of Jules Verne's realistic stories 
wherein he springs his romantic catastrophes upon scientific 
phenomena — "Michael Strogoff" — he makes Michael fall among 
enemies who sentence him to be blinded. The blinding is to 
be accomplished with a heated iron, but Michael sees his mother 
at his side, and, tears suffusing his eyes, the heat of the iron is 
neutralized, and fails to destroy the sight. So, in " King John," 
Act IV., Scene 1, Arthur says to Hubert: 

The iron of itself, though heat red-hot, 
Approaching near these eyes would drink my tears 
And quench his fiery indignation. 

This may be mere coincidence, but the dramas are crowded with 



PART II. — THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 83 

no " jack-of- all-trades," and could not have lived and 
publicly presented bis compositions nightly, year in 
and year out, in the glare of a metropolis crowded 
with courtiers, play-goers, and students — in the age 
and da}'S of Bacon and Raleigh and Elizabeth — un- 
known s .ve to a handful of his pot-fellows, and faded 
out of the world, unknown and unnoticed, fading from 
the memory of men, without the passing of an item 
in their mouths ! 

Most wonderful of all, this utter ignoring of Wil- 
liam Shakespeare among the poets, if unjust, provoked 
no remonstrance from the immediate family or any 
kin of the Stratford lad. Either the Shakespeares, 
Arclens, and Hathaways were wonderfully destitute 
of family pride, or else the obscurity accorded their 
connection was perfectly just and proper. No voice 
of kin or affinity of William Shakespeare (at least we 
may say this with confidence) ever claimed immortality 
for him ; although it can not be said that they had no 
opportunity, had they wished to do so, for William 
Shakespeare's granddaughter, Lady Barnard, was alive 
until 1670; his sister, Joan Hart, till 1646; and his 
daughters, Susannah Hall and Judith Queeny, until 
1662. So that Dugdale, at least, if not Wood and the 
rest of them, would not have had to go far to confirm 
any rumors they might have stumbled upon as to the 

such coincidences, and for that, if for that only, are marvelous. 
In either case, according to the Shakespereans, we have only to 
go on, for the rest of time, in discovering new truths in nature 
and facts in science, only to find that the Stratford butcher's 
boy knew all about them three hundred years ago — was famil- 
iar with all that we have yet to learn, and that to his unlettered 
genius our wisdom was to be sheer foolishness. 



84 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

acquirements and accomplishments of the man Shakes- 
peare; but it seems that not even the partiality of 
his own kin, nor family fame, nor pride of ancestry, 
ever conceived the idea of palming off their progeni- 
tor upon futurity as a giant of any build. If there is 
any exception to this statement, it would appear to be 
as follows : 

I. It is recorded by Oldys that, one of his (Shakes- 
peare's) " younger brothers, who lived to a great 
age, when questioned, in his last days, about Wil- 
liam, said he could remember nothing of his perform- 
ance but seeing him ' act a part in one of his own 
comedies, wherein, being to j>ersonate a decrepit old 
man, he wore a long beard, and appeared so weak and 
drooping and unable to walk, that he was forced to be 
supported and carried to a table at which he was 
seated among some company, and one of them sang 
a song.' " Mr. Fullom has demonstrated from the 
Shakespeare family records, that Oldys must have 
been mistaken as to any brother of William Shakes- 
peare's having furnished this reminiscence; but, 
admitting it as the statement of a surviving brother, 
it stands for what it is, and it certainly is not the rec- 
ord or tradition of one whose popular memory in 
men's minds was that of an immortal prodigy. 1 

1 We take this quotation from Mr. Grant White's article on 
Shakespeare in Appleton's " American Cyclopcedia." Mr. 
White's admirable contributions to our Shakespearean literature 
entitle his opinion to great weight in any mooted question as to 
William Shakespeare; and we must confess that some portions 
of his paper we have just mentioned almost suggest him as 
agreeing with us as to his subject. Mr. White says, in another 
place : " Young lawyers and poets produced plays rapidly. Each 



PART II. — THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 85 

II. An epitaph was placed over the remains of Su- 
sannah Hall, presumably by one of the family, which 
read: 

" Witty above her sex, but that's not all: 
Wise to salvation was good Mistress Hall. 
Something of Shakespeare was in that, but this 
Wholly of him with whom she's now in bliss." 

Whether the writer of this mortuary eulogy meant 
that either William Shakespeare or Mistress Hall, or 
both, were " witty above their sex" or " wise to sal- 
vation," cannot, at this date, be determined : but it 
would seem that this is all the immediate family of 
William Shakespeare have ever contributed to our 
knowledge of him, and that their estimate of him 
was not unlike that of his chroniclers and contempo- 
raries. 

But Mr. Malone — and, being the first investigator, 
he would, doubtless, have been followed, as he has 
been, whatever the result of his inquiries — Mr. Ma- 
lone, in spite of the silence of the authorities to whose 

theatrical company not only ' kept a poet,' but had three or four, 
in its pay. At the time of his leaving Stratford the drama was 
rising rapidly in favor with all classes in London, where actors 
were made much of in a certain way. And where there was a 
constant demand for new plays, ill-provided younger sons of the 
gentry, and others who had been bred at the universities and the 
inns-of-court, sought to mend their fortunes by supplying this 
demand." And again: "We are tolerably well informed by 
contemporary writers as to the performances of the eminent act- 
ors of that time, but of Shakespeare's we read nothing." Mr. 
White admits, a few lines below the sentence just quoted, that 
Shakespeare's position in the stock at the Blackfriars was "gen- 
eral utility." We should rather call it, from the evidence, "first 
old man." 



86 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

pages lie had recourse, not only assumed all he could 
not find authority for, but undertook to tell us the 
precise dates at which his Stratford lad composed the 
plays themselves. Among other achievements he con- 
structed an admirable "chronology" of the Shakes- 
pearean plays; which — with such fanciful variations 
as have been made to it from time to time since — is an 
authority with the Shakespeareans even to this day. 
To be sure, Mr. Malone did not rely entirely upon ex- 
ternal evidence for this apochrypha. He often appeals 
to the text, as when, for example, he settles the elate 
at which the "Merchant of Venice" was .composed — 
as 1594, because Portia says : 

" Even as a flourish when true subjects bow 
To a new crowned monarch," 

referring of course, says Mr. Malone, (and this guess- 
work he not only called " commentary," but has ac- 
tually succeeded in making all his successor " com- 
mentators" accept him as final) to the coronation of 
Henry IV., of France ! Again, in the " Merry Wives 
of "Windsor" he finds the words, (Act I, scene iii) 
" Sail like my pinnace to these golden shores." " This 
shows," says Mr. Malone, " that this comedy must 
have been written after Sir Walter Ealeigh's return 
from Guinia, in 1596." And so on. 

We will not rehearse the scope and burden of Mr. 
Malone's painstaking and wonderful labors, but, from 
one instance of the credulity which, once it has over- 
mastered the ablest mind, can suppress and subordinate 
reason, judgment, and common sense to a zealous and 
silly search, we can judge of the calm historical value 
of his " discoveries." In 1808, Mr. Malone published 



PAET IT. — THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 87 

a pamphlet — " An Account of the Incidents from which 
the Title and Part of the Story of 'The Tempest' 
were derived, and the Date ascertained." 1 It seems 
that Mr. Malone finds reference to a hurricane that 
once dispersed a certain fleet of a certain nobleman, 
one Sir George Somers, in July, 1609, on a pas- 
sage, with provisions, for the Virginia Colony; the 
above nobleman, and a Sir Thomas Gates, having been 
wrecked on the island of Bermuda. This discovery 
is warranty enough for Mr. Malone, and he goes on 
gravely to argue that William Shakespeare not only 
wrote his "Tempest" to commemorate this particular 

1 By Edmond Malone. London : printed by C. & R. Baldwin, 
Newbridge street, 1808. 

The "Tempest" is the most purely fanciful and poetical of 
the Shakespearean plays, but the commentators determined to 
show that there is nothing fanciful or poetical about it; that 
it is all real: the "Magic Island," a real island; the magician 
Prospero, a real portrait; the " monster," a real, living curiosity, 
which happened to be on exhibition in England in the days 
when the play either was written or about to be written, (it makes 
no difference to these gentlemen which) and the storm at sea — 
as if the brain which conceived the play could not have con- 
ceived — what is not, now-a-days, at least, the most uncommon 
thing in the world — a storm at sea !— a real historical hurricane ! 

In 1839, the Reverend Joseph Hunter, following in the Malone 
footsteps, published "A Disquisition on the Scene, Origin. Date, 
etc., of Shakespeare's Tempest," in which the Magic Island is 
the island of Lampedusa: first, because it is uninhabited; sec- 
ondly, because it is small; thirdly, because it lies on the route 
between Naples and the coast of Africa, so that had a prince been 
traveling from one to the other, and wrecked on an island be- 
tween, he could have been conveniently wrecked on this one 
without going out of his course; fourthly, because it bore 
the reputation (Mr. Hunter does not say with whom) of being 



88 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

tempest — and, as will be seen by an examination of 
the premises, the relation between the occurrence and 
the play is confined merely to the word "tempest" 
and goes no further — but that he (Shakespeare) did 
not place the scene of his shipwreck on the Bermudas, 
"because he could spread a greater glamour over the 
whole by not alluding to so well-known islands as the 
Bermudas." Mr. Malone further remarks naively 
that, " without having read Tacitus, he (Shakespeare) 
well knew that ( omne ignotum pro magnifico est ' ! " 
Without pausing to wonder how Mr. Malone knew 
that Shakespeare of Stratford had never read Tacitus 
— (a slander, by the way, on the omniscient Shakes- 
peare — the man who studied Plautus in early man- 
uscript, the author of " Julius Csesar " — that he 
had not read a simple Latin historian !) — or to dwell 
on the most marvelous coincidence between the wreck 
of Sir George Somers and that of Prince Ferdinand 

haunted; fifthly, because there was a cell upon it, which Pros- 
pero might have found most opportune for his ghostly resi- 
dence; and sixthly, that the island of Malta gets fire-wood from 
it. This last fact being strongest in the way of proof, because 
we are told that Prospero impressed Ferdinand into his service 
and kept him piling logs of wood. 

But it was reserved for Mr. Edward Dowden, in 1881, to locate 
the island beyond the necessity of farther conjecture, and to 
give us accurate sailing directions for reaching it. " Prospero' s 
Island," he tells us, "was imagined by Shakespeare as within 
two days' quick sail of Naples," for " Ariel is promised his free- 
dom after two days" (Act I, scene ii). "Why two days? The 
time of the entire action of the Tempest is only three hours. What 
was to be the employment of Ariel during two days ? To make 
the winds and seas favorable during the voyage." (Dowden's 
Shakespeare's Mind and Art. New York : Harper & Brothers. 
1881. p. 373.) 



PART II. — THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 89 

(the coincidence, according to Malone, being, that one 
was wrecked on the Bermuda and the other wasn't); 
or ask if a storm at sea was so rare an occurrence as 
to be eas'ly identified; or to note that "the tempest" 
in the play of that name is an episode which covers 
only about a dozen lines of text, and which has abso- 
lutely nothing to do with the rest of the argument — ■ 
without pausing for this, or to remark that Mr. Malone 
might have taken to himself the i omne ignotum pro 
magnifico est" of Tacitus more appositely than lie ap- 
plied it either to Sir George Somers or the Bermudas, 
had he reflected as generously as he took it for granted 
— it is as well to take our leave of Mr. Malone and his 
labors at this point, with a compliment to their zeal 
and impressment which must be withheld from their 
results. 1 

And the world would doubtless be as well off could 
we also here take leave of the rest of the Shakespeare- 
makers. But we are not allowed to do so. From the 
time of Malone onward, the Shakespeare-making, 
Shakespeare-mending, and Shakespeare-cobbling have 
gone on without relaxation. Each fresh rencontre 
with an emergency in the Shakespearean text has ne- 
cessitated at least one and often several new Shakes- 
peares. And they have been prepared and forthcom- 
ing as fast as wanted. Was it found that the bard had, 
of all his worldly goods, left the wife of his bosom no 
recognition save the devise of a ramshackle old bed- 
stead? A score of gentlemen hurried to the front to 
prove that, by law, history, logic, custom, and every 

1 DeQuincy accepts this "origin" "with great alacrity." 
8 



90 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

thing else, in those days a " secon'd-best bed " was 
really the most priceless of possessions ; of fabulous 
value, and a fortune in itself; and that in no other 
way could her immortal husband have so testified his 
tender regard and appreciation of Mrs. Shakespeare— 
the sweet Ann Hathaway of old, who had thrown 
herself away on a scapegrace butcher's son ! The fact 
(as it appears, on inspection of the instrument itself, 
to be) that Mrs. Shakespeare was not even alluded to 
in the first draft of the testament — her name and the 
complimentary devise of the precious husband's prec- 
ious " second-best bed " having been written in as " a 
poet's after-thought," and not appearing in the first 
draft at all — does not affect their statements in the 
least! They have even gone so far as to ascertain 
that William was no truant lord to willingly desert his 
lonesome lady. According to the very latest authority 
we are able to cite, the fault of the separation was 
wholly her own. We are assured by a very recent ex- 
plorer that Mrs. Shakespeare " did not accompany her 
husband to London, objecting to the noise and turmoil 
of that city." x Unless it be assumed, therefore, that 
investigation is reliable in proportion to the distance 
from its subject at which it works, it would seem to 

1 " Shakespeare and his Contemporaries." By William Tegg, 
F. R. H. S. London: William Tegg & Co., 1879. Chapter I., 
" Sketch of the Life of Shakespeare," p. 4. As every circum- 
stance connected with William Shakespeare and Stratford is of 
interest in the connection, we may as well note that, according 
to Mr. Grant White, when William Shakespeare first went to 
London, he went into the office of a cousin of his, who was an 
attorney in that city. Like Mr. Tegg, Mr. White gives himself 
as an authority for this item. See his " Shakespeare " in John- 
ston's Encyclopaedia. 



PART II. — THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 91 

appear that, even if the William Shakespeare we have 
portrayed were our own creation, the creation is actu- 
ally a nearer resemblance to the William Shakespeare 
known to those nearest to him in residence and time; 
than the inspired genius of the Shakespeareans, who, 
from Malone downward, have rejected every shred .of 
fact they found at hand, and weaved, instead, their 
warp and woof of fiction (and that it is charming and 
absorbing fiction, we are eager to admit) around a 
vision of their own. 

Nor have the Shakespeareans rested their labors 
here. Having created a Shakespeare to fit the plays, 
it was necessary to proceed to create a face to fit the 
Shakespeare, and a cranial development wherein might 
lodge and whence might spring the magic of the works 
he ought to have written. This may, very fairly, be 
called " the young, ladies' argument." * " Look on his 
portrait," say the Shakespeareans; " look at that mag- 
nificent head ! " — and they point to the Chandos por- 
trait — "is not that the head of a genius?" "Was 
there ever such a head?" We shoald say, yes, there 
might have been such another head created, even ad- 
mitting the Chandos portrait to be the very counter- 
feit head of William Shakespeare. But it does not 
appear, on taking the trouble to look into the matter, 
either that the Chandos picture is a portrait, or that 
— with one exception — any other of the pictures, casts, 
masks, busts, or statues of William Shakespeare are 
any thing but works of art, embodying the individual 

1 So the young ladies of New York were of opinion that Stokes 
should not be hanged for the murder of Fisk, " because he was 
so awfully good-looking." 



92 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

inspiration — the ideal of the artist, who conceives, in 
every case, his own " Shakespeare;" (and if we were 
called upon for proof that " Shakespeare" is quite as 
much of an ideal to the most of us as a " Hamlet," or 
a "Lear," we could cite, perhaps, nothing more con- 
vincing than the latitude which is allowed to artists 
with any ( f the three — " Shakespeare," "Hamlet," or 
"Lear," and the elaborate criticism to which a new 
"portrait" of either of them is subjected — criticism, 
which, in the case of a portrait of William Shakespeare, 
in no case pretends to be historical, but is always ro- 
mantic, or sentimental, or picturesque : as to the proper 
pose of a poet, or the correct attitude for a man re- 
ceiving efflatus directly from the gods; never as to the 
stage manager of the Blackfriars, or the husband of 
Anne Hathaway, or the son of John Shakespeare, of 
Stratford.) 

It appears that, as a matter of fact, there never w T as 
but one picture of the Elizabethan Manager which 
ever enjoyed any thing in the semblance of a certifica- 
tion to its authenticity ; and that certification was in 
the very unsatisfactory form of rhyme, in the shape of 
a set of verses said to have been written by Ben Jon- 
son (and, as we propose to show, are quite as likely to 
have been placed under the particular picture without 
Jonson's authority as with it) ; while, that they were 
written to lit the particular picture in question (for they 
are in the form of a sort of apostrophe to some picture 
or portrait, and will be hereafter quoted), there seems 
to be no information sufficient to form a belief either 
way. If they w^ere written for that particular picture, 
and if that particular picture is a speaking likeness, 
then the phrenological, or at least the physiognomical, 



PART II.— THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 93 

argument must droop away and die; for the person rep- 
resented has as stupefied, stultified, and insignificant 
a human countenance as was ever put upon an en- 
graver's surface; and, as a matter of fact, no Shakes- 
pearean has jet been found to admit it as the image of 
his dream. But, of course, this is mere matter of pe^ 
sonal opinion, and entitled to no weight w r hatever in 
the discussion. The question is — Is there any authentic 
portrait of William Shakespeare, as there is of Eliza- 
beth, Bacon, Raleigh, Southampton, and other more 
or less prominent characters of the age in which 
William Shakespeare is known to have lived and died ? 
Let us do the best we can toward investigating this 
question. 

We have before us a volume, " An Enquiry into the 
Authenticity of Various Pictures and Prints, which, 
from the Decease of the Poet to our own Times, have 
been offered to the Public as Portraits of Shakespeare. 
Containing a Careful Examination of the Evidence on 
which they claim to be received ; by which the Pre- 
tended Portraits have been rejected, the Genuine con- 
firmed and established," etc., etc. By James Boaden, 
Esq. 1 We must content ourselves with a simple re- 
view of Mr. Boaden's labors. He was a friend and 
disciple of Malone's, and a Shakespearean ; a believer 
in the poet ; and he writes under the shadow of the 
mighty name — the shadow out from under which we 
of this age have stepped, and so become able to in- 
spect, not ouly the facts of history uncurtained by that 
shadow, but the shadow itself. But we will take every 

1 London. Printed for Robert Triphook, 23 Old Bond Street, 

1824. 



94 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

one of Mr. Boaden's statements for granted, neverthe- 
less, and draw our opinions, when we venture on any, 
from the portraits which he has given in his book. At 
least Mr. Boaden is not a " Baconian," and not a 
" Raleigh man," and, whenever he finds it necessary 
to speak of Shakespeare's history, he follows Malone's 
own version. For convenience, we will change Mr. 
Boaden's numeration of the " portraits," preserving 
the designation, however, which he assigns them. 

E~o. 1. William Shakespeare dies in Stratford in 
1616. In 1623, appears, on the title-page of Hemin- 
ges and CondeU's first folio of the plays, the portrait 
by Martin Droesbout. It is an engraving, and, Mr. 
Boaden believes, a good engraving, of some original 
picture from which it must have been taken ; u for," 
he says, "there were good engravers in those days; 
for Chapman's 'Homer' was published in that year, 
with a very fine engraving of Chapman." 

Under this engraving is printed a copy of Jonson's 
lines, as follows : 

TO THE READER. 

This figure that thou here seest put, 

It was for gentle Shakespeare cut ; 

Wherein the graver had a strife l 

With nature to outdo the life : 

0, could he but have drawn his wit 

As well in brasse as he hath hit 

His face : the print would then surpasse 

All that was ever done in brasse. 

But, since he can not, reader, look, 

Not on his picture, but his booke. 

(1) Look, when a painter would surpasse the life, 
His art's with nature's handiwork at strife. 

Venus and Adonis. 



PART II. — THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 95 

In this picture the head of the subject is represented 
as rising out of an horizontal plain of collar appalling 
to behold. The hair is straight, combed down the 
sides of the face and bunched over the ears; the fore- 
head is disproportionately high; the top of the head 
bald; the face has the wooden expression familiar in 
the Scotchmen and Indians used as signs by tobacco- 
nists' shops, accompanied by an idiotic stare that 
would be but a sorry advertisement for the humblest 
establishment in that trade; and which we would be 
quite as unlikely to look for in the Stratford scapegrace 
as in the immortal bard of the Shakespeareans. It is 
of this picture that Boaden quotes somebody's remark 
that " it is lucky these metrical commendations are not 
required to be delivered on oath." And Steevens says, 
on the supposition that Ben Jonson, and not the en- 
graver, put the copy of verses on the title-page be- 
neath the effigy: " Ben Jonson might know little 
about art, care less about the resemblance, and, never 
having compared the engraving from the picture, have 
rested satisfied with the recollection that the original 
was a faithful resemblance ; and that, no doubt, the en- 
graver had achieved all that his art could perform. 5 ' 

No. 2. The edition of the poens of 1640 is accom- 
panied with what is known as "Marshall's picture;" 
which so closely follows, as to face, forehead, hair, 
beard, and collar, the engraving above described, as to 
suggest that it was a copy either of that engraving, or 
of the unknown picture from which that was taken. 
But, if a copy, it is certainly, from a pictorial point of 
view, an improvement. It looks much more like a 
man. The simpleton stare around the eyes is toned 
down, and the wooden aspect is modified into some- 



96 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

thing like life. Marshall has taken liberties with the 
dress of No. 1, throwing in a sort of tunic over the 
left shoulder, hitching on an arm with a gauntleted 
hand grasping a sprig of laurel, etc., etc. 

No. 3. The Felton Head. — " In the catalogue of the 
fourth exhibition and sale b\^ private contract," says 
Boaden,"(page 81),"at the European Museum, King 
Street, St. James Square, 1792," this picture was an- 
nounced to the public in the following words : 

" No. 359 — a curious portrait of Shakespeare, painted in 1597." 

On the 31st of May, 1792, a Mr. Felton bought it 
for five guineas, and, on requiring its credentials, re- 
ceived the following letter : 

To Mr. S. Felton, Drayton, Shropshire — Sir: The head of 
Shakespeare was purchased out of an old house, known by the 
sign of " The Boar," in Eastcheap, London, where Shakespeare 
and his friends used to resort; and report says was painted by a 
player of that time, but whose name I have not been able to learn. 

This letter was signed "J. Wilson," who was the 
conductor of the European Museum. This "J. Wil- 
son" appears to have been the original Barnum. Al- 
though Prince Hal and Falstaff are said in the play 
to have affected "The Boar's head in Eastcheap," it 
does not appear, except from Mr. "J. Wilson," that 
" Shakespeare and his friends" ever resorted thither. 
There was an old inn in Eastcheap, but it was not 
called " The Boar's Head." There was an inn by that 
name, however, in Blackfriars, near the theater, from 
which the manager might have borrowed it. Then, 
again, Mr. " J. Wilson " seemed to have forgotten the 
great fire in London in 1666, which, "in a few hours. 



PART II. — THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 9Y 

in a strong east wind, left the whole of Eastcheap a 
mass of smoking ruins, and the wretched inhabitants 
could think of saving nothing but their lives." Mr. 
Wilson subsequently amended his story so as to read 
that " it was found between four and five years ago at 
a broker's shop at the Minories by a man of fashion, 
whose name must be concealed," etc., etc. Mr. Stee- 
vens, who scouted the other pictures as spurious, ac- 
cepted this picture, for a time, as the original of the 
engravings we have called No. 1 and No. 2; but fin- 
ally, the whole thing exploded and was forgotten. 

No. 4. The Bust in Stratford Church.— This waa 
carved by nobody knows whom, from nobody knows 
what, nobody knows when; for the statement that it 
was cut by " Gerard Johnson," an Amsterdam "tomb- 
maker," is invariably accepted, but can be traced to no 
historical source. Says Boaden (page 81), "The per- 
formance is not too good for a native sculptor." In 
1623 Leonard Digges alludes to it in a few verses well 
known. It seems to have been originally colored, but 
there is no testimony as to the original colors. In 1748, 
one hundred and twenty-five years after Digges, John 
Hall, a Stratford artist, "restored" it, painting the 
eyes a light hazel, and the hair and beard auburn. 
This was "a good enough" Shakespeare for all prac- 
tical purposes for the next half-hundred years or so. 
But in 1793 came Mr. Malone. He caused the bust 
— in deference, probably, to a purer taste and a sense 
of churchly propriety — to be covered completely with 
a thick coat of white paint. 1 From this bust, Mr. 

1 While these pages are going through the press (April, 1879), 
however, we find a statement that within a year or two (and 
9 



98 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

Boaden says, a Mr. Bullock once took a cast, which, 
is sometimes engraved as frontispiece to an edition of 
the plays, in which case it is entitled "Cast of the 
head of William Shakespeare, taken after death," 
which may or may not — for Mr. Boaden can not tell 
us who this "Mr. Bullock" was — be the German 
"Death Mask" noticed further on, (at any rate the 
statement " taken after death" — William Shakespeare 
being unquestionably dead at the time — is literally 
true.) 

The bust represents its subject as possessing a mag- 
nificent head, admirably proportioned, with no pro- 
truding "bumps." The face is represented as break- 
ing into a smile. According to this effigy, Shakes- 
peare must have had an extraordinarily long upper 
lip, the distance between the base of the nose and the 
mouth being remarkably out of proportion with the 
other facial developments; there seems to be a little 
difficulty, too, about the chin, which is pulled out into 
what appears to be a sort of extra nose; but, neverthe- 
less, the Stratford bust represents a fine, soldierly-look- 
ing man, with a fierce military mustache cocked up 
at the ends, and a goatee. If Ben Jonson — knowing 
his friend William Shakespeare to have been the mar- 
tial and altogether elegant- looking gentleman the 
Stratford bust represents him — authorized the verses 
we have already quoted to be placed under the " Droe- 
shout engraving,'* it was a deliberate libel on his part, 
and as gross as it was deliberate, and only perhaps to 

since the writer of these pages visited it) one Simon Colling 
has applied a bath to the bust — removing Malone's whitewash, 
and revealing the identical auburn hair and hazel eyes which 
tradition had asserted to be underneath. 



PART II. — THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 99 

be explained by Jouson's alleged secret enmity to, or 
jealousy of, William. Shakespeare, his rival playwright, 
which we shall be called to examine at length further 
on. 1 

No. 5. "The Chandos Portrait." This picture, so 
termed because once the property of the Duke of 
Chandos, is the best known of all the so-called por- 
traits — being, in fact, the one from which the popular 
idea of Shakespeare is derived; therefore, when a man 
is said to resemble Shakespeare, it is meant to be con- 
veyed that he bears a likeness to the Chandos picture. 
Mr. Malone announced that it was painted in 1607, 
but never gave any other authority than his own ipse 
dixit for the statement, not even taking the trouble to 
refer, like Mr. J. Wilson, to "a man of fashion, whose 
name must be concealed." Mr. Boaden says (page 42) 
that he once saw it, and compared it " with what had 
been termed a fine copy, I think by Piamberg, and 
found it utterly unlike." " Indeed," he continues, " I 
never saw anything that resembled it." He also says 
(pages 41-42) that "the copies by Sir Joshua Reynolds 
and Mr. Humphrey were not only unlike the original, 
but were unlike each other, one being smiling and the 
other grave." That is to say, that not only have the 
romancers constructed "biographies," but the artists 
have kept up with them; and we may, every one of 
us, select our own Shakespeare to-day — poet or pot- 
man, scholar or clown, tall or short, fair or dark; we 
may each suit our own tastes with a Shakespeare to 
our liking. Mr. Boaden continues (page 49): "It" 
(the Chandos) " was very probably painted by Burbage, 

1 Post Part III. The Jonsonian testimony. 



100 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

the great tragedian, who is known to have handled 
the pencil; it is said to have been the property of Jos- 
eph Taylor, our poet's Hamlet, who, dying about 1653, 
at the advanced age of seventy, left the picture by will 
to Davenant. At the death of Davenant in 1663, it 
was bought by Betterton, the actor, and when he died 
Mr. Robert Keck, of the Inner Temple, gave Mrs. 
Barry, the actress, forty guineas for it. From Mr. 
Keck it passed to Mr. Nichol, of Southgate, whose 
daughter married the Marquis of Caernarvon. 

Steevens, whom Boaden quotes (page 43), declined 
to be convinced by this genealogy, and said, " Gos- 
sip rumor had given out that Davenant was more 
than Shakespeare's godson. 1 What folly, therefore, to 
suppose that he should possess a genuine portrait of 
the poet, when his lawful daughters had not one ! Mrs. 
Barry was an actress of acknowledged gallantry ; as 
she received forty guineas for the picture, something 
more animated might have been included though not 
specified in the bargain," etc., etc. Steevens was 
fond of calling this picture " the Davenantico-Bet- 

1 There is a story that once, on the occasion of one of Shakes- 
peare's visits to Stratford, a villager, meeting young Davenant 
in the street, asked him where he was going. " To the inn, to see 
my godfather Shakespeare," said the lad. "Beware how you 
take the name of God in vain, my lad," said the other. The al- 
lusions to William's gallantries are numerous. On the Stratford 
parish records there is entry of the birth of one " Thomas Green, 
alias Shakespeare." The tale of the interrupted amour, at the 
theater, of " Richard the Third" and "William the Conqueror," 
as is apt to be the case, is about the most widely familiar of the 
Shakespearean stories, and unnecessary to be repeated here. 
But Davenant was proud to claim the dishonor of his mother, 
and Shakespeare for his father, to his dying day. 






PART II. — THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 101 

tertono-Barryan-Keckian-Nicolsian-Chandosian por- 
trait." " There are," says Boaden (page 53), " a few 
circumstances relating to the picture of which some 
notice should be taken in this examination. There is, 
it seems, a tradition that, no original picture of 
Shakespeare existing, Sir Thomas Clarges caused a" 
(i. e., this) " portrait to be painted from a young man 
who had the good fortune to resemble him " (i. e., 
Shakespeare. Query: How did Sir Thomas know that 
the young man resembled Shakespeare ?). Mr. Malone 
traced this story to " The Gentleman's Magazine" for 
August, 1759, and called on the writer for his authority ; 
but the writer, whoever he was, never gave it, any 
more than Malone gave his authority for announcing 
its date to be 1607 ; but Malone himself says that "most 
reports of this kind are an adumbration of some fact, 
and indication of something in kind or degree similar 
or analogous." 

No. 6. This is a portrait, so called, by Zuccharo, which 
need not detain us, since Mr. Boaden himself demon- 
strates very clearly that it was not in any event painted 
from life, and, not improbably, did not originally claim 
to have been intended for Shakespeare at all. 

Mr. Boaden's No. 7 is the " Cornelius Jansen pic- 
ture," and to this Mr. Boaden pins his earnest faith. 
He says this "is uoav in the collection of the Duke of 
Somerset;" but he appears to make no attempt to 
connect it with William Shakespeare except as follows : 
Cornelius Jansen is said to have painted the daughter 
of Southampton — ergo, he might have been South- 
ampton's family painter, and Southampton might have 
been desirous to possess a portrait of his friend Shakes- 
peare done by his own painter — ergo, Jansen might 



102 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

have had William Shakespeare for a sitter ! This is 
all the authority for the authenticity. But that it is — 
judging from the engraving in Mr. Boaden's book — a 
magnificent picture, we think there can be no question. 

On the supposition that the Chandos is an authentic 
likeness of Shakespeare, this Jan sen certainly bears a 
strong Shakespearean resemblance. In it the hair is 
curling, as in the Chandos, not straight, as in the 
Droeshout and the Marshall engravings. The mus- 
tache, which is cut tight to the face without being 
shaved, as in the Droeshout, and strong and heavy, as 
in the bust, is lighter than the Chandos, while the 
beard is fuller. There is nothing of the tremendous 
upper lip represented in the bust. 

Mr. Boaden (page 195) describes it as an eye-witness, 
he having had access to it for the purposes of the book 
before us. He says : " It is an early picture by Cor- 
nelius Jansen, tenderly and beautifully painted. Time 
seems to have treated it with infinite kindness, for it is 
quite pure, and exhibits its original surface. . 
The portrait is on panel, and attention will be required 
to prevent a splitting of the oak, in two places, if my 
eyes have not deceived me." 

As for Earlom, who copied the picture, Boaden says : 
" He had lessened the amplitude of the forehead ; he 
had altered the form of the skull; he had falsified the 
character of the mouth; and, though his engraving 
was still beautiful, and the most agreeable exhibition 
of the poet, I found it would be absolutely necessary 
to draw the head again, as if he had never exercised 
his talent upon it" (page 195). Mr. Boaden speci- 
fies further the picture said to have once decorated 
the pair of bellows belonging to Queen Elizabeth's 



PART II. — THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 103 

own private apartments, besides still one other, both of 
which he rejects as spurious. 

Thus, it has taken an army of novelists, painters, 
engravers, and essayists to erect simple William 
Shakespeare of Stratford into the god he ought to have 
been; and, on the best examination we are enabled to 
make, and according to the Shakespeareans themselves, 
there is only one picture of William Shakespeare ex- 
tant which has the even assumed advantage of having 
been pronounced a likeness by any one who ever saw 
William Shakespeare himself in his (William Shakes- 
peare's) lifetime. Even if — as Mr. Steevens surmises 
— this eye witness never saw the engraving, but only 
the original portrait from which it was copied, the 
Droeshout still enjoys an authentication possessed by 
no other so-called likeness, and, if rejected — as it in- 
fallibly is by all devout Shakespeareans — there remains 
nothing of certitude, nothing even of the certitude of 
conjecture, as to the features of the Stratford boy, 
whoever he was, and whatever his works. One fur- 
ther effort was, however, made, so lately as 1849, to 
clinch this "young lady's argument,'' by yet one more 
genuine discovery. This time it was a " Becker 6 death 
mask ! ' " A plaster mask of an anonymous dead face 
is found in a rubbish-shop in Mayence, in 1849. Re- 
garded as a mask of William Shakespeare, it bears a 
certain resemblance to the Stratford bust; and, re- 
garded as a mask of Count Bismarck (for example), it 
would be found to bear a very strong resemblance to 
Count Bismarck. (We write from an inspection of 
photographs only, never having seen the mask.) Hav- 
ing always been annoyed that a creature so immortal 



104 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

as they had created their Shakespeare left no death- 
mask, the Shakespeareans at once adopt this anony- 
mous mask as taken from the face of the two-days de- 
funct William Shakespeare, who died in 1616. Credat 
Judwus! Either "William Shakespeare, at his death, 
was known to be an immortal bard or he was not. If 
he was, how could the sole likeness moulded of de- 
parted greatness be smuggled away from the land that 
was pious to claim him as its most distinguished son 
and nobody miss it, or raise the hue and cry? If he 
was not, to whose interest was it to steal the mask 
from the family who cared enough about the dead 
man's memory to go to the expense of it? But, at 
any rate, in 1849 it falls into the hands of jealous be- 
lievers. They search upon it for hairs of auburn hue, 
and for the date of their hero's death, and they find 
both. Had they made up their minds to find a scrap 
of Shakespearean cuticle, we may be sure it would have 
been there. Professor Owen, of the British Museum, 
declared that, if the fact of the mask having origin- 
ally come from England could be established, there 
was " hardly any sum of money which the Museum 
would not pay for the mask itself." But the missing 
testimony has not been supplied, though doubtless it 
is incubating. For now and then we see a newspaper 
paragraph to the effect that old paintings have turned 
up (in pawn-shops invariably) which "resemble the 
death-mask," thus accustoming us to the title, which, 
in time, we shall doubtless come to accept- — as we have 
come to accept Shakespeare himself — from mere force 
of habit. The last of these discoveries is in Australia, 
farther off than even Mayence, " said to resemble the 



PART II. — THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 105 

Becker death-mask." 1 The Stratford portrait of 
Shakespeare claims no authority further than a re- 
semblance to the accepted ideal, and the terra-cotta 
bust in the possession of the Garrick club was "found 
to order," and represents a man who, it would seem, 
bore not even a resemblance to the accepted Shake- 
spearean features. 

We should, perhaps, mention that Mr. Boaden sur- 
mises that the Droeshout picture is a portrait of Wil- 
liam Shakespeare the actor, in the character of " Old 
Knowell," and that the Stratford bust was caused to 
be executed by Dr. Hall, a son-in-law of its subject, 
and was the work of one Thomas Stanton, who fol- 
lowed a cast taken after death. But, as Mr. Boaden 
admits, this is his surmise only. However insuper- 
able, therefore, in the run of cases, the " young la- 
dies argument" to prove from the pictures that Wil- 
liam Shakespeare was not author of the plays is quite 
weak enough; but, as an argument to prove that he 
was such author, it is weakness and impotence itself. 

It now becomes necessary to ask the ordinary ques- 
tion which a court would be obliged to ask concerning 
any exhibit produced before it, and claimed as authentic 
or authoritative : namely, Where did the plays called 
Shakespeare's come from ? how did they get into print ? 
who, if anybody, delivered the "copy" to the printer, and 
vouched for its authorship? It is manifest that we have 
no business here with any question of criticism, or as 
to an authenticity between different editions of the 

1 See the "Academy," London, May 31, 1879, p. 475. We un- 
derstand that the mask is at present in possession of the British 
Museum. 



106 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

same play; but the plays were written to be played; 
how did they come to be published so that millions of 
readers, who never entered a playhouse where they 
were performed, read and still read them? 

In order to arrive at any supposition as to these con- 
siderations which would be of value to our purpose in 
these papers, it will be necessary to glance at the state 
of literary property in the days between 1585 and 
1606. Now, in those days, there was absolutely no 
legal protection for an author's manuscript. Once it 
had strayed beyond the writers hand it was practically 
" publici juris " — any body's property. The first law of 
copyright enacted in England was the act of Anne, of 
April 10, 1710, more than one hundred years after the 
last date at which commentators claim the production 
of a Shakespearean play. Even the first authoritative 
pronunciation of a competent tribunal as to literary 
property at common law (which preceded, of course, 
all literary property definable by statute) was not made 
until 1769, fifty-nine years later. But the Court of 
Star Chamber (of obscure origin, but known to have 
been of powerful jurisdiction in the time of Henry 
VII.) was in the height of its ancient omnipotence in 
those years. And of the various matters of which it 
took cognizance, one of the earliest was the publishing, 
printing, and even the keeping and reading of books. 
Under date of June 23, 1585 — the year that many com- 
mentators assign as that in which William Shakes- 
peare first turned up in London — this Star Chamber, 
which had already issued many such, issued a decree 
that none should " print any book, work, or copy, 
against the form or meaning of any restraint con- 
tained in any statute of laws of this realm," except, 



PART II. — THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 107 

etc., etc. Twenty-nine years before — in 1556 — Philip 
and Mary bad erected ninety-seven booksellers into a 
body called "The Stationers' Company," who were to 
monopolize the printing of books, if they so chose. 
They had given them power and authority — and their 
second charter, in 1558, confirmed them in it — to print 
such books as they obtained, either from authors' man- 
uscripts or translations, and to see very carefully that 
nobody else printed them. Their power was absolute 
— they had their "privilegium ad imprimendum 
solum," and in the pursuit of any body who interfered 
with it they were empowered to "break locks, search, 
seize," and, in short, to suppress any printed matter 
they did not choose to license, wherever they pleased. 
This the Worshipful Company of Stationers did not 
fail to do; they pursued, and the Star Chamber con- 
victed. The disgraceful record of infamous and inhu- 
man prosecutions and punishments for reading, keep- 
ing, selling, or making books might well detain us 
here, did our scope permit. 1 Whatever literature ac- 
complished in those clays it accomplished by stealth, in 
defiance of the implacable and omnipotent Star Cham- 
ber and its bloodhound, the Stationers' Company, who 
ran in its victims. 

It can not, we think, be doubted, by a student of 
those times, 2 that whatever literary property existed 

1 See " Omitted Chapters of the History of England," by Andrew 
Basset, 1864 

2 "The person who first resolved on printing a hook, and en- 
tered his design on that register, became thereby the legal pro- 
prietor of that work, and had the sole right of printing it." — 
Carte, quoted in " Reasons for a Further Amendment of the Act 
54, George III., c. 15," London, 1817. 

John Camden Hotten, " Seven Letters, Etc., on Literary Prop- 



108 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

at common law then existed in the shape of a license 
to print a work under permission of the Stationers' 
Company; that no estate or property obtained in any- 
thing except the types, ink, paper, in the license to use 
them all together to make a book, and in the resulting 
volume ; and that what we understand by " copyright" 
to-clay — namely, an author's or a proprietor's right to 
demand a royalty or percentage, or to exercise other 
control over the work when once printed and pub- 
lished — was altogether unconceived and unclaimed. 
Whatever compensation the author of a work was 
able to obtain, he doubtless obtained beforehand, by 
sale of his manuscript, and dreamed not of setting up 
a tangible property as against any one who had ob- 
tained the Stationers' Company's license to print it. 
The Stationers' Company, at the outset of their career, 
opened a record, in which it entered the name of every 
book it licensed — the date, and the name of the person 
authorized to print it. 1 It was not until 1644, twenty- 
eight years after William Shakespeare's death (so far 
as we can ever know) that John Milton, in his "Are- 
opagitica " — the greatest state paper in the republic 

erty," London, Hotten, 1871, describes the modern Stationers' 
Company as entrusted with " a vested interest over somebody 
else's property, a prescriptive right to interfere with the future 
work of other people's hands." 

1 We are aware that this statement as to the condition of au- 
thors' rights in the days of Elizabeth will not pass unchallenged; 
but a review of the reported cases, as well as the extant records 
of the Stationers' Company, will, we think, support our conclu- 
sion. The first reported case of piracy was in 1735, when the 
Master of the Rolls enjoined publication of " The whole Duty of 
Man" (Morgan's "Law of Literature," vol. ii., p. 672). 



PART II. — THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 109 

of letters, the declaration of independence, and the 
bill of rights of the liberty of literature — asserted 1 for 
the first time " the right of every man" to "his several 
copy, which God forbid should be gainsayd." 

Once in their hands, printers did what they pleased 
with a manuscript; abridged it if they found it too 
long, and lengthened it if they found it too short. 
Thomas Nashe says, that, in a play of his, called " The 
Isle of Dogs," four acts, without his consent "or the 
least guesse of his drifte or scope," were added by the 
printers. 2 The printers also assigned the authorship of 
the work to any name they thought would help sell 
the book, and dedicated it to whom they pleased. 
(Just as the first printer of the sonnets we call Shakes- 
peare's, dedicated them to "W. H.," which two 
initials have supplied the Shakespeareans with an 
excuse for at least as many dozen octavo volumes 
of conjecture as to who " W. H." was.) Sometimes 
the author thus despotically assigned to the work 
rebelled. Dr. Heywood recognized two of his own 
compositions in a collection of verses called " The 
Passionate Pilgrim," printed by one Jaggard, in 1599, 
upon the title-page to which, this Jaggard had placed 
the name of William Shakespeare as author. Hey- 
wood publicly claimed his own, but William Shakes- 
peare never denied or affirmed; his name, however, 
was removed by the printer from the title-page of the 

1 For the text of the "Areopagitica" and copious notes as to the 
history of the days which called it out, see edition of J. W. 
Hale's, Clarendon Press Series, Macmillan & Co., Oxford, 1874. 

2 In a pamphlet, "The Prayse of the Eed Herring" cited by 
Farmer, in his " Learning of Shakespeare," page 45. 



110 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

third edition of the book, in 1612. 1 But, as a rule, the 
Stationers' Company were too powerful, and the author 
too poor, to bring the trick to exposure. 

It was under these circumstances, and in times like 
these, that the Shakespearean plays began to appear in 
print. Where did they come from ? They were written 
to be played. According to all accounts they were very 
valuable to the theater which produced them. Every 
personal and selfish interest of the proprietors, whether 
of the theater or of the manuscript plays, dictated that 
they should be kept in secret — least of all that they 
should be printed and made accessible to the public 
outside of the theater, who otherwise, to see them, 
must become patrons of the house where they were 
performed. That the author or authors of the plays 
could have made them of more profit by selling them 
to the printers than to the players is doubtful; that 
they personally entered them — or such of them as were 
entered — on the books of the Stationers' Company, is 
certainly not the fact ; the only persons to whose inter- 
est it was to print them were the printers themselves, 
and, in all probability, it was the printers who did cause 
them to be printed. But where did these printers pro- 
cure the "copy" from which to set up the plays they 
printed? The question will never be answered. The 
manuscripts might have been procured by bribing indi- 
vidual actors, each of whom could have easily furnished 
a copy of his individual part, and so the whole be made 
up for the press. The fact that the plays never were 
printed without more or less of the stage directions or 
"business" included, lends probability to this theory: 

1 Shakespeare, by R. G. White. Vol. 1., page lxxvii. 



PART II. — THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. Ill 

but, as to whether a play made up in this fashion would 
have resulted in any thing like what we possess to-day, 
we have considered further on. Mr. Grant White ad- 
mits, 1 as must everybody who examines into the mat- 
ter, that whatever the printers printed was unauthor- 
ized and surreptitious. But, having admitted this 
much, Mr. White is too ardent a Shakespearean not 
to make some effort to throw a guise of authenticity 
around the text he has so lovingly followed. In the 
article we have just quoted from in our foot-note, he 
says, "It is not improbable that, in case of great and 
injurious misrepresentation of the text of a play by" 
this surreptitious method of publication, "fair copies 
were furnished by the theatrical people at the author's 
request in self-defence." Perhaps these plays might 
have found their way into print just as the comedy 
of "Play" found its way into print in 1868, 2 or the 
play of "Mary Warner, 3 at about the same date. At 
any rate the editors of the first folio speak of the 
" stolne and surreptitious copies " which had preceded 
them. 

1 " Such of his plays as were published during his lifetime seem 
to have been given to the press entirely without his agency ; in- 
deed, his interest was against their publication. ... It was 
the interest of all concerned, whether as proprietors, or only as 
actors, or, like himself, as both, that the theaters should have the 
entire benefit of whatever favor they enjoyed with the public. 
But the publishers, or stationers, as they were then called, eagerly 
sought copies of them for publication, and obtained them sur- 
reptitiously : sometimes, it would seem, by corrupting persons 
connected with the theater, and sometimes, as the text which 
they printed shows, by sending short-hand writers to the per- 
formance." 

2 Palmer v. DeWitt, 47 New York K. 532. 

3 Crowe v. Aiken. 2 Bissel R. 208. 



112 THE SHAKESPEAKEAN MYTH. 

The first and second editions of "Hamlet," says Mr. 
White, " in 1603 and 1604, might have been the result 
of such maneuvers on the part of the printers and the 
stenographers, or those who had access to the manu- 
scripts of the author. However this may be, twenty of 
Shakespeare's plays were published by various station- 
ers during his lifetime ; they are known as the quartos, 
from the form in which they are printed. They are 
most of the m full of errors. . . . Some of them seem 
to have been put in type from stage copies, or, not im- 
probably, from an aggregation of the separate parts 
which were in the hands of the various actors." In 
other words, Shakespeare's works were so imperfectly 
printed, against his will, during his lifetime, that he 
himself authorized other imperfect — Mr. White says 
they were imperfect — versions to be likewise printed! 

Mr. White might have looked nearer home to more 
purpose. Nobody knows, nobody can know better 
than he, that what is called the "accepted" or "re- 
ceived" text of Shakespeare (if there is, to speak 
minutely, any such to-day) has been arrived at and 
made up piecemeal, and in the course of time, by the 
commentators selecting from the folios, and other 
original editions, such "readings" as the judgment 
of scholarship or the taste of criticism has, on the 
whole, adopted; and any body who cares to take the 
trouble to examine these original editions can see as 
much for himself. To suppose that this text, as it 
stands to-day, is the text as its author or authors wrote 
it, is, it seems to us, to suppose at least ten thousand 
coincidences, every one of which is, to say the least, 
improbable. 

Before proceeding any further, let us recapitulate 



PART II. — THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 113 

the three historical certainties to which we have ar- 
rived. First, that the state of the law was favorable, 
(indeed, it would be impossible to conceive of a state 
more favorable), to literary imposture or incognito. 
Second, that nobody stands on record as claiming to 
know the authorship of these plays, except the print- 
ers, who were able to sell them by using the name of the 
manager of a popular theater ; and, therefore, whose 
interest it was to affix that name to them ; and, Third, 
that there was never a period in which it was so rea- 
sonably an author's interest to be anonymous, or pre- 
serve his incognito, as these very years covered by the 
lifetime of William Shakespeare; when, between the 
Stationers' Company and the Star Chamber, it was a 
fortunate author, printer or reader, who escaped hang- 
ing, disemboweling, and quartering, with only the 
loss of ears or liberty. 

Who wrote these plays? London was full of play- 
wrights, contemporary with William Shakespeare, 
many of them his friends and familiars ; possibly, all 
of them submitting their manuscripts to his editorial 
eye. We have their works extant to-day. 

Ben Jonson was a poet and a pedant; Greene 1 , a 
university-bred man. And we may go through the list 
and verify the records of them all, and find in each 
some quality or training from which to -reasonably ex- 
pect fruitage. But nobody has ever ventured to haz- 
ard so wild a theory as that any of them wrote the 
anonymous immortal plays to which the best of their 
own acknowledged masterpieces are mere rubbish. 
But a butcher's boy, lately from Stratford, happens to 
be manager of a contemporary theater. He, there- 
10 



114 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

fore, must be the writer, and there can not be the 
slightest doubt of it. The story that this boy ever 
stole deer is rejected as resting on insufficient evidence. 
But no evidence is required to prove his authorship 
of the topmost works in the history or the literature 
of England. We have seen the monopoly that overruled 
the press. "We have seen that the Stationers' Company 
insisted upon recording the name and ownership of 
every printed thing; and their record-books are still ex- 
tant, and bear no trace of any such claimant as William 
Shakespeare. We have weighed the surmises of the 
Shakespeareans as to these times, and seen their proba- 
ble value; aud have found it just as impossible to con- 
nect the immortal fragments we call the Shakespearean 
plays to-day with William Shakespeare, of Stratford, 
as we have already found it to imagine him as having 
access to the material, the sealed records, and the hid- 
den muniments employed in their construction. Is 
there any more evidence to be examined? 

But were these plays, so printed outside, the same 
plays as those acted inside the theater ? When we re- 
call the style of audiences that assembled in those days 
(M. Taine says the spectators caroused and sang songs 
while the plays progressed; that they drank great 
draughts of beer; and, if they drank too much, burned 
juniper instead of retiring; anon, they would break 
upon the stage, toss in a blanket such performers as 
pleased them not, tear up the properties, etc., etc.) — 
when we recall this, it is not the easiest thing in the 
world to imagine this audience so very highly de- 
lighted, for instance, with Wolsey's long soliloquy 
(which the actor of to-day delivers in a dignified, low, 
and unimpassioned monotone, without gesture), or 



PART II. — THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 115 

Hamlet's philosophical monologues, or Isabella's pious 
strains. Some plays were highly popular inside those 
theaters. "Were these the ones ? Mr. Grant White has 
all reason, probability, and common sense on his side, 
when he insists that the theater most jealously guarded 
the manuscripts of the plays that were making its 
fortune ; and that it would have been suicide in it to 
have circulated them outside, in print. But may not 
the echo of the popularity of certain plays called 
"Hamlet," "King John," "Macbeth," etc., have in- 
duced others, outside the theater, to have circulated 
plays, christened with these names (or with and under 
the popular name of Shakespeare), for gain among 
the "unco guid" who would not, or the impecunious 
who could not, enter the theater door? There is no 
need of opening up so hopeless a speculation — a spec- 
ulation pure and simple, that can never, in the nature 
of things, be confronted by data either way. But the 
fact does remain that these marvelous plays appeared 
in print contemporaneously with the professional 
career of an actor named William Shakespeare, and 
in the same town where he acted ; that, if they were 
his, it would have been to his interest to have kept 
them out of print; and that their appearance in print 
he most certainly did not authorize; and who can 
claim that one guess is not as good as another, where 
history is silent, and tradition askew, and the truth 
buried under the dust of centuries, overtopped by the 
rubbish of conjecture? We repeat, we have no war- 
rant to intrude upon the domain of criticism. The 
Shakespearean text, as we possess it to-day, is too price- 
less, whatever its source, to be rudely touched. But, 
so far as is revealed by the record of its appearance 



116 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

among printed literature, there is no evidence, internal 
or external, as to William Shakespeare's production of 
it, and as to its origin we are as hopelessly in the dark 
as ever. 

Dubious as is the chronicle of those days as to other 
matters, it is singularly clear as to what was printed 
and what was not. For those were the sort of days 
when men whose names were not written in the books 
of the Stationers' Company printed at the peril of 
clipped ears and slit noses, or worse; and those books 
are still extant. But, by the fatality which seems to 
follow and pervade the name of William Shakespeare, 
this record, like every other, national or local, yields 
nothing to the probe but disappointment and silence 
as to the man of Stratford and the actor of Blackfriars. 

We will, presently, consider as to whether the same 
intellect composed the " Hamlet " at one sitting, and 
at another, located Bohemia on the sea-coast; and 
whether, on inspection, it might not be strongly sug- 
gested that the two conceptions indicated geniuses of 
quite different orders and not one and the same per- 
son ; that one showed the hand-marks of a poet and 
the other the hand-marks of the stage-manager, etc. 
If the limits of this work permitted, we believe the 
same hand-marks might be collected from the treat- 
ment of the text of every play. For instance, the 
" Comedy of Errors " is supposed to occur during the 
days when Ephesus was ruled by a duke, and follows 
— as we have already shown — the unities of the Me- 
nsechmi of Plautus. But the ignoramus who doctored 
the paraphrase for the Blackfriars stage found it con- 
venient, to bring on his stage effect, to introduce a 
Christian monastery into Ephesus at about that time, 



PART II. — THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 117 

with a lady abbess who could refuse admission to the 
duke himself, so inviolable and sacred was the sanc- 
tuary of consecrated Christian walls ! The monastery 
was as convenient to bringing all the befogged and 
befooled and sadly mixed up personages of the comedy 
face to face at the moment, as was the seashore and the 
bear, in " A Winter's Tale," to account for the princess 
Perdita among the shepherds, and so in they all go. 
These, and the like brummagem and ruses de con- 
venances, are simple enough to understand, and detract 
in no degree whatever from the value of the plays : 
they can be retired or retained at pleasure, and no 
harm done, if we only remember to whom and to 
what they are assignable. But, if we forget that, and 
insist that the very same pen which wrote the dialogue 
wrote the setting — wrote every entrance, exit, and 
direction to the scene-shifters and stage- carpenters, 
and, therefore, that every dot and comma, every call and 
cue, every "gag" and localism, is as sacred as holy 
writ, no wonder the scholars of the text are puzzled! 
For example, we find that Mr. Wilkes, and Mr. 
Harper, in the " American Catholic Review " for 
January, 1879 — who otherwise believe the author 
of the Shakespearean plays to have been a roman 
catholic — are almost persuaded that he must have 
been a protestant, because he finds occasion to make 
mention of an " evening mass." But let us assure 
Messrs. Wilkes and Harper that they need neither 
abandon nor adopt a theory on rencontre with so 
trivial a phenomenon. If William Shakespeare felt 
the need of an " evening mass " at any time, we may 
be fairly sure, from our experience of that worthy, 
that he put one in. He had bolted too many camels 



118 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

in his day to hesitate at such a gnat as that! The 
creator of a convent in old Ephesus and of a sea- 
coast to Bohemia was not one to stick at a trifling 
" evening mass ! " 

The gentlemen above mentioned, believe the author 
of the plays to have been a romanist, not because the 
reverend Richard Davies, writing soon after 1685, 
distinctly says " he died a Papist," (for any statement 
made anywhere within a hundred years of William 
Shakespeare's lifetime is " mere gossip," aud it is 
only the biographies we write now-a-days that are to 
be relied upon), but mainly because the liturgy and 
priesthood of that church are invariably treated with 
respect in the plays, while dissenting parsons are 
poked fun at without stint. Doubtless, in the modern 
drama the same rule will be perceived to obtain. The 
imperious liturgy and priesthood of the roman or of 
the stately anglican church appear to be beyond the 
attempts of travesty; while the snivel and preach 
of mere puritanism has always been too tempting an 
opportunity for "Aminadab Sleek" and his type — 
to be resisted, and such a fact would justify very 
little conclusion either way. Besides, there is no call 
to insist that the stage, in epitomizing life into the 
compass of an hour, shall preserve every detail; 
nothing less than a Chinese theater could answer a 
demand like that. There is a dramatic license even 
broader than the license accorded to poetry, and we 
would doubtless find the drama a sad bore if there 
were not. William Shakespeare, during his mana- 
gerial career, appears to have understood this as well 
as any body; nor have the liberties he took with 
facts and chronology befogged any body, except the 



PAET II. — THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 119 

daily lessening throng of investigators, who helieve 
him to be the original of the masterpieces he cut 
into play-books for his stage. 

But did William Shakespeare ever try his hand at 
verse-making? There is considerable rumor to the 
effect that, during the leisure of his later life, no less 
than in the lampooning efforts of his vagrom youth, 
he did turn his pen to rhymes. And the future may 
yet bring forth a Shakespearean honest enough to 
collect these verses — as they follow here — and to 
entitle them — 

THE COMPLETE POETICAL WORKS 
OF 

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. 

EPITAPH ON ELIAS JAMES. 1 

When G-od was pleased, the world unwilling yet, 

Elias James to nature paid his debt, 

And here reposeth ; as he liv'd he dyde; 

The saying in him strongly verified — 

Such life, such death; then, the known truth to tell, 

He lived a godly lyfe, and dyde as well. 

EPITAPH ON SIR THOMAS STANLEY. 2 

Ask who lyes here, but do not weepe: 

He is not dead, he doth but sleepe; 

This stony register is for his bones, 

His fame is more perpetual than these stones, 

x On the authority of "a MS. volume of poems by Herrick 
and others, said to be in the handwriting of Charles I., in the 
Bodleian Library. 

2 On the authority of Sir William Dugdale (" Visitation 
Book"), who says, " The following verses were made by William 
Shakespeare, the late famous tragedian." This appears to be 
our author's longest and most ambitious work. 



120 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

And his own goodness, with himself being gone, 
Shall live when earthly monument is none. 

Not monumental stone preserves our fame 

Nor skye aspyring pyramids our name; 

The memory of him for whom this stands 

Shall outlive marble and defacer's hands, 

When all to Time's consumption shall be given; 

Stanley, for whom this stands, shall stand in heaven. 

EPITAPH ON TOM-A-COMBE, OTHERWISE THINBEARD. * 

Thin in beard and thick in purse, 
Never man beloved worse ; 
He went to the grave with many a curse, 
The Devil and he had both one nurse. 

WHOM I HAVE DRUNKEN WITH. 2 

Piping Pebworth, dancing Marston, 
Haunted Hillsborough and hungry Grafton ; 
With dancing Exhall, Papist Wixford, 
Beggarly Bloom and drunken Bidford. 

DAVID AND GOLIATH. 3 

Goliath comes with sword and spear, 

And David with a sling ; 
Although Goliath rage and swear 

Down David doth him bring. 

ON JOHN COMBE, A COVETOUS RICH MAN, MR. WILLIAM SHAKE-SPEARE 
WRIGHT THIS ATT HIS REQUEST WHILE HEE WAS TETT L1VEING FOR HIS 
EPITAPHE. 4 

Ten in the hundred lies here engraved ; 
' Tis a hundred to ten his soul is not saved; 

x On the authority of Peck, "Memoirs of Milton," 4to, 1740. 

2 On the authority of John Jordan. There is a strong poetic 
license here — according to the well-known legend, William had 
really only drunk with Bidford; the quantrain is probably the 
work of Jordan and not Shakespeare. 

3 On the authority of Stratford local tradition. 
4 Ashmolean MS., cited by Halliwell. The pun is on the War- 






PART II. — THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 121 

If any one asks, " Who lies in this tomb ? " 

" Ho ! ho ! " quoth the Devil, " 'tis my John a Combe." 

BUT BEING DEAD, AND MAKIN T G THE POOR HIS HEIRES, HEE AFTER 
WRIGHTES THIS FOR HIS EPITAPHE. 1 

Howere he lived judge not, 

John Combe shall never be forgott 

While poor hathe memmorye, for he did gather 

To make the poor his issue, he their father, 

As record of his tilth and seedes, 

Did crown him in his later needes. 

Finis. W. Shak. 

LAMPOON ON SIR THOMAS LUCY. 2 

Sir Thomas was too covetous, 
To covet so much deer, 

wickshire pronunciation, "Ho! ho!" quoth the Devil, "'tis my 
John has come ! " See Aubrey's version : 

" Ten in the hundred the Devil allows, 
Bat Coombs will have twelve he swears and vows," etc. 

1 Ashmolean MS. same as preceding. Both the above are 
given by Mr. Grant White. Shakespeare, vol. I, p. ci. 

2 This is given to us by Mr. S. W. Fullom (History of William 
Shakespeare, Player and Poet; with New Facts and Traditions. 
London: Saunders, Oatley & Co., 1864, p. 133, with the following 
note : " The manner in which this fragment was recovered is not 
different from that to which we owe so many local ballads, known 
only to the common people. About 1690, Joshua Barnes, the 
Greek Professor at Cambridge, was in an inn at Stratford, when 
he heard an old woman singing these stanzas, and, discerning 
the association with Shakespeare, offered her ten guineas to re- 
peat the whole ballad. This, however, she was unable to do, 
having forgotten the remaining portion." Mr. Fullom says these 
verses "reveal the Shakespearean touch," and alludes to a scan- 
dal touching Lady Lucy's infidelity to her husband. 

The following additional verses were furnished by John Jor- 
dan, who altered the above stanza into the same meter, and as- 
11 



122 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

When horns enough upon his head 
Most plainly do appear. 

Had not his worship one deer left ? 
What then ? he had a wife 

serted the whole to be Shakespeare, as unearthed and restored 
by himself: 

He's a haughty, proud, insolent knight of the shire 
At home nobody loves, yet there's many that fear; 
If Lucy is lowsie, as some volke miscall it — 
Synge lowsie Lucy, whatever befall it. 

To the Sessions he went, and did lowdly complain 
His park had been robbed and his deere they were slain; 
This Lucy is lowsie, as some volke miscall it— 
Synge lowsie Lucy, whatever befall it. 

He sayd 'twas a ryot, his men had been beat, 
His venison was stol'n and clandestinely eat: 
So Lucy is lowsie as some volke miscall it — 
Synge lowsie Lucy, whatever befall it. 

So haughty was he when the fact was confessed 
He sayd 'twas a wrong that could not be redressed; 
So Lucy is lowsie, as some volke miscall it — 
Synge lowsie Lucy, whatever befall it. 

Though luces a dozen he wear on his coat, 
His name it shall lowsie for Lucy be wrote; 
For Lucy is lowsie, as some volke miscall it — 
We'll sing lowsie Lucy, whatever befall it. 

If a juvenile frolic he can not forgive, 
We'll sing lowsie Lucy as long as we live; 
And Lucy the lowsie a libel may call it — 
We'll sing lowsie Lucy whatever befall it. 

Mr. Collier (Shakespeare, K. G. White, Ed. 1854, p. cciii), gives 

the following four verses as by William Shakespeare: 

r 

ON THE KING. 
Crown have their compass, length of days their date, 
Triumphs their tomb, Felicity her fate; 
Of naught but earth can earth make us partaker, 
But knowledge makes a king most like his maker. 

but gives no other authority for it than " a coeval manuscript." 
The world has, very regrettingly, come to look with such suspi- 
cion on Mr. Collier's discoveries, that this relic, until confirmed, 
will hardly be accepted as genuine. 



PART II. — THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 123 

Took pains enough to find him horns 
Should last him all his life. 

ANOTHER VERSION OF THE LAMPOON. 1 

A Parliament member, a justice of peace, 
At home a poor scarecrow, at London an asse; 
If lowsie is Lucy, as some volke miscalle it, 
Then Lucy is lowsie, whatever befalle it. 

He thinks himself greate, 

Yet an asse is his state : 
We allowe by his ears but with asses to mate. 
If Lucy is lowsie, as some volke miscalle it, 
Sing, lowsie Lucy, whate'er befalle it. 

Some lampoon was affixed by young William to 
Sir Thomas Lucy's park gate, and enraged the baro- 
net to such a degree that — according to Capell — he di- 
rected a lawyer at Warwick to commence a prosecu- 
tion against the lad. The Lucy note, however, makes 
no mention of the lawyer, only stating that young 
Shakespeare deemed it prudent to quit Stratford, 
" at least for a time." The long ballad of six stanzas 
(which we give in the foot-note) was written by John 
Jordan, a harmless rustic who lived at Stratford in 
the days of Malone and Ireland, i. e. in the last years 
of the eighteenth century, and went about claiming 
to have inherited the mantle of Shakespeare. The 
"Piping Pebworth" verses, and perhaps the whole 
story,were written by him. At any rate, he seems to 
have succeeded in obtaining immortality by mixing 
his own efforts so successfully with the Shakespearean 

1 According to Capell, Oldys, and Grant White. (See Mr. 
White's Shakespeare, Vol. I. p. xxxviii.) Oldys leaves out the 
"0" in the fourth and eighth lines. Mr. Fullom (cited above) 
declares this version to be spurious. (See note 3, p. 121.) 



124 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

remains as to make them all one in the local tradi- 
tions. The above, with the 

INSCRIPTION FOR HIS OWN TOMB. 

Good frend, for Jesvs' sake forbeare, 
To digg y e dust encloased here. 
Blesse be y e man y* spares thes stones, 
And cvrst be he y t moves my bones. 

(which was originally placed on the stone over Wil- 
liam Shakespeare's vault in the chancel of Trinity 
Church, Stratford — was recut in the new stone which 
was found necessary fifty years ago, and now ap- 
pears with the verbal contractions as given above) 
are all the literary compositions which, according to 
the local traditions of Stratford, his home, where he 
was born, lived, and died — where alone, for a century 
or more after his death his reputation was cherished — 
William Shakespeare ever produced. There is noth- 
ing in them inconsistent with the record of the man 
himself; and, so far as we know, have never been re- 
jected by the Shakespeareans themselves. It certainly 
would not be honest, in our present appeal to his- 
tory, to insert in this edition — we may fairly call it 
" The Stratford Edition " — of Master Shakespeare's 
poetry, all that he edited for the stage; or, worse yet, 
borrowed and dressed up, and — according to Robert 
Greene — passed for his own. 

We are very far from desiring even to do justice to 
poor Robert Greene, if in so doing we shall detract a 
hair's weight from the merits of William Shakespeare. 
But it is not impossible to say a good word even for 
Greene. Although his language is not within such 
bounds of propriety as the Shakespeareans could wish, 



PART II. — THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 125 

modern research has amply proved that he told the 
truth, and that William Shakespeare borrowed, or 
rather seized upon and adopted, without compensation, 
the work by which Greene earned his bread. For 
Greene's language, Chettle, Greene's editor, makes 
haste, sometime afterward, when William Shakespeare 
had been taken up by "divers of worship" to apolo- 
gize, as far as an editor can apologize for an author. 
We shall see, further on, how William Shakespeare 
was shrewd enough to make himself useful to these 
"divers of worship," and in those days, and for a cen- 
tury after, no slavery was so abject as the slavery of 
letters to patronage. So, of course, Chettle hastened 
to make his peace with them too. But the truth 
remains, nevertheless, that poor Greene told only 
the truth. It is fashionable with the Shakespeareans 
to sneer at Greene, because he was "jealous" of 
Shakespeare. He appears to have had reason to 
be jealous! But no name is bad enough to bestow 
on him. Mr. Grant White says : " Robert Greene, 
writing from the fitting deathbed of a groveling de- 
bauchee, warns three of his literary companions to 
shun intercourse with," etc., " certain actors, Shakes- 
peare among the rest." If Robert Greene died from 
over-debauch, it is no more than Shakespeare himself 
died of, according to the entry in the diary of the 
Rev. John Ward. "It is not impossible," says Mr. 
White, "even that this piece of gossiping tradition is 
true." Mr. White is right to call it "gossiping tradi- 
tion," for it is piece and parcel of all the other men- 
tion of William Shakespeare of Stratford. If it were 
not for " gossiping tradition," we had never heard, and 
Mr. White had never written, of that personage. But 



126 • THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

Mr. White makes no reservation of " gossiping tra- 
dition" in the case of Kobert Greene. Greene dies 
"on the fitting deathbed of a groveling debauchee," 
because he was jealous of William Shakespeare, and 
was so injudicious, and so far forgot himself as to 
call that "jack of all trades" an " upstart crowe, beau- 
tified with our feathers," etc. It seems that poor 
Robert Greene's dying words— if they were his dying 
words — were his ante-mortem legacy of warning and 
prophecy to the ages which were to follow him. But 
they have not been heeded. His " upstart crowe " 
has not only kept all his borrowed feathers, but is ar- 
rayed each passing day with somebody's richer and 
brighter plumage. If Robert Greene could speak from 
the dust, he doubtless could tell us — as Jonson and the 
rest mi^ht have told us in their lifetimes, if thev 
only would — whose all this plumage really was and is. 
But all are dust and ashes together now — dust and 
ashes three centuries old— and, as Miss Bacon said, 
"Who loses any thing that does not find" the secret of 
that dust? However, not a Shakespearean stops to waste 
a sigh over the memory of poor Robert Greene, 1 who 
saw his bread snatched from his mouth by a scissorer 
of other men's brains, and who was too human to see 

1 " Robert Greene was a clergyman, and with no less poetry or 
rhetoric than his fellows (Nash, Peele, and William Shakespeare), 
was, from his miscellaneous and discursive reading, a very useful 
man in his coterie." Dr. Latham speaks of his book as " A 
Groats Worth of Rest, purchased with a Million of Repentance," 
which certainly makes better sense than " a groat's worth of 
wit," etc., as usually written. Which is right? Greene died 
in 1592. 



PART II. — THE APPEAL TO HISTORY. 127 

and hold his peace ; but over the drunken grave of the 
Stratford pretender — who was vanquished in his cups 
at Bidford and Pebworth, and lay all night under the 
thorn-tree, but who died bravely in them at the last — 
they weep as for one cut off untimely, as Dame Quickly 
over the lazared and lecherous clay of Sir John Fal- 
staff: "Nay, sure, he's in Arthur's bosom, if ever a 
man went to Arthur's bosom. 'A made a finer end, 
and went away an it had been any Christom child." 
But let us not assume the appearance of unkindness 
to William Shakespeare. He lived a merry lifer; and, 
so far as we can know, wronged nobody except his 
own wife, poor Eobert Greene, and perhaps the delin- 
quent for malt delivered. He loved his own, but that 
is no wrong. And, we must not forget that, so far as 
the world can ever know, he claimed not as his, save 
by his silence, the works a too nattering posterity has 
assigned him. 

The appeal to history not only declines to set aside, 
but affirms, with costs, the verdict rendered upon the 
evidence. And the sum is briefly this : If William 
Shakespeare wrote the plays, it was a miracle ; every 
thing else being equal, the presumption is against a 
miracle; but, here, every thing else is not equal, for all 
the facts of history are reconcilable with history and 
irreconcilable with the miracle; if history is history, 
then miracle there was none — in other words, if there 
were one miracle, then there must have been two. If 
there had lived no such man as William Shakespeare, 
that "William Shakespeare" would be as good a name 
as any other to designate the authorship of the Shakes- 
pearean page, who will consider it worth while to 



128 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

question ? But to credit the historical man with the 
living page demands, in our estimation, either a willful 
credulity, or an innocence that is almost physical blind- 
ness! 



PART III. — THE JONSONIAN TESTIMONY. 129 




[PART III. 

THE JONSONIAN TESTIMONY. 

UT what is the summing up on the other 

side ? Merely the following copy of verses : 

TO THE MEMORY OF MY BELOVED, THE AUTHOR, MASTER 
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, AND WHAT HE HATH LEFT US. 

To draw no envy, Shakespeare, on thy name 

Am I thus ample to thy book and fame ; 

While I confess thy writings to be such 

As neither man nor muse can praise too much. 

'Tis true and all men's suffrage. But these ways 

Were not the paths I meant unto thy praise; 

For seeliest ignorance on these may light, 

Which, when it sounds at best, but echoes right; 

Or blind affection, which doth ne'er advance 

The truth, but gropes, and urgeth all by chance; 

Or crafty malice might pretend this praise 

And think to ruin where it seemed to raise. 

These are as some infamous bawd or whore 

Should praise a matron ; what could hurt her more? 

But thou art proof against them, and, indeed, 

Above the ill fortune of them, or the need, 

I, therefore, will begin : Soul of the age, 

The applause, delight, and wonder of our stage ! 

My Shakespeare rise ! I will not lodge thee by 

Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie 

A little further to make thee a room. 

Thou art a monument without a tomb, 

And art alive still while thy book doth live 

And we have wits to read and praise to give. 

That I not mix thee so, my brain excuses, 

I mean with great but disproportioned muses. 



130 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

For if I thought my judgment were of years, 

I should commit thee surely with thy peers, 

And tell how far thou didst our Lyly outshine, 

Or sporting Kyd, or Marlowe's mighty line; 

And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek, 

From thence to honor thee I would not seek 

For names : but call forth thundering iEschylus, 

Euripides and Sophocles to us. 

Pacuvius, Accius, him of Cordova dead, 

To life again to hear thy buskin tread 

And shake a stage ; or, when thy socks were on 

Leave thee alone for the comparison 

Of all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome 

Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come. 

Triumph, my Britain, thou hast one to show 

To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe. 

He was not of an age, but for all time ! 

And all the muses still were in their prime 

When, like Apollo, he came forth to warm 

Our ears ; or like a Mercury to charm. 

Nature herself was proud of his designs, 

And joyed to wear the dressing of his lines! 

Which were so richly spun and woven so fit 

As, since she will vouchsafe no other wit, 

The merry Greek, tart Aristophanes, 

Neat Terence, witty Plautus, how not please, 

But antiquated and deserted lie 

As they were not of nature's family. 

Yet must I not give nature all ; thy Art, 

My gentle Shakespeare, must enjoy a part; 

For though the poet's matter Nature be, 

His art doth give the fashion; and that he 

Who casts to write a living line must sweat 

(Such as thine are), and strike the second heat 

Upon the muse's anvil ; turn the same 

And himself with it, that he thinks to frame, 

Or for the laurel he may gain a scorn, 

For a good poet 's made, as well as born; 

And such wert thou ! Look how the father's face 



PART III. — THE J0NS0NIAN TESTIMONY. 131 

Lives in his issue, even so the race 

Of Shakespeare's mind and manners brightly shines 

In his well-turned and true-filled lines: 

In each of which he seems to shake a lance 

As brandished at the eyes of Ignorance. 

Sweet swan of Avon, what a sight it were 

To see thee in our waters yet appear, 

And make those flights upon the banks of Thames 

That did so take Eliza and our James ! 

Shine forth, thou Star of Poets, and with rage 

Or influence chide or cheer the drooping stage, 

Which, since thy flight from hence, hath mourned like 

night 
And despairs day, but for thy volume's light. 

This is all there is of Jonson's labored verses, of 
which very few Shakespeareans care to quote more 
than isolated passages of a line or two each. But 
taking them either as a whole (with their involved met- 
aphors and most execrable and inapposite pun about 
Shakespeare's lines " shaking a lance at Iguorance ") — 
or in spots (whichever spots the Shakespeareans prefer), 
what sort of historical proof does this poem afford? 
What sort of testimony is this as to a fact ? Is it the 
sort we accept in our own personal affairs — in our bus- 
iness — in our courts of justice — in matters in which 
we have any thing at stake, or any living interest? 
Will any insurance company pay its risk on the ship 
Dolphin, on being furnished, by the Dolphin's owners, 
with a thrilling poem by Mr. Tennyson or Mr. Tup- 
per, describing the dreadful shipwreck of the Dolphin, 
the thunderous tempest in which she went down — the 
sky-capping waves, rent sails, creaking cordage, etc., 
etc. ? Will any jury of twelve men hang a thirteenth 
man for murder on production, by the State, of a har- 
rowing copy of verses, dwelling on midnight assassina- 



132 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

tion, stealthy stabs, shrieking victims, inconsolable 
widows, orphans, and the like? And shall we require 
less or more proof, in proportion as the fact to be 
proved is nearer or more remote ? 

However, since the Shakespeareans rest their case 
on these verses, (for any one who cares to examine for 
himself will find the residue of the so-called u contem- 
porary testimony," which is usually in rhyme, to be 
rather criticism — that is to say eulogy, for we find 
very little of any other sort of literary criticism in 
those clays- — as to the compositions than chronicle as 
to the man) we can well afford to waive these ques- 
tions, and cross-examine Ben Jonson and his verses 
without pressing any objection to their competency. 

For criticism of the works is what Meres's 1 opinion 
that "the sweete wittie soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous 
and honey-tongued Shakespeare; witness his ' Yen us 
and Adonis,' his 'Lucrece,' his sugared sonnets 
among his private friends. ... As Plautus and 
Seneca are accounted the best for comedy and tragedy 
among the Latines, so Shakespeare among the English 
is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage. . . 
As Epius Stoio said that the Muses would speake with 
Plautus' tongue, if they would speake Latin, so I say 
that the Muses would speake with Shakespeare's fine- 
filed phrase, if they would speake English," etc., etc., 
etc., amount to ; and so Weever's 

" Honey-tongued Shakespeare, when I saw thine issue, 
I swore Apollo got them, and none other" — 

probably means, if it means any thing, precisely what 
it says, namely, that when he read the plays, he swore 

^'Palladis Tamia." 



PART III. — THE JONSONIAN TESTIMONY. 133 

that they were certainly Apollo's. And if the comments 
of Henry Chettle, Sir John Davies, Leonard Digges, 
Hugh Holland, and the rest, do not read to the same 
effect, they have a meaning beyond what they express. 
But panegyric is not history — at least it can not over- 
ride history. 

Between the affirmative theory of the Stratfordian 
authorship, then, and the demonstration of its utter 
impossibility and absurdity, there actually remains but 
the single barrier of the Jonsonian testimony, con- 
tained in the copy of verses entitled " To the Memory 
of my Beloved, the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare, 
and what he hath left us," written by Mr. Ben Jon- 
son, and prefixed to the famous folio of 1623. If this 
testimony should ever be ruled out as incompetent, 
there w T ould actually remain nothi-ng except to lay the 
Shakespearean hoax away, as gently as might be, 
alongside its fellows in the populous limbo of ex- 
ploded fallacies. 

However, let it not be ruled out merely on the 
ground that it is in rhyme. We have no less an 
authority than Littleton — " auctoritas philosopho- 
rum, medicorum et poetarum sunt in causis allegan- 
dse et tenendse " l — to the effect that the testimony, 
even of poets, is sometimes to be received. It is to be 
ruled out rather by a process akin to impeachment of 
the witness — by its appearing that the witness, else- 
where in the same controversy, testifies to a state of 
facts exactly opposite. For the truth is that, what- 
ever Ben Jonson felt moved to say about his "pal" 
William Shakespeare, whenever, " as a friend, he 

l "Co. Lit.," 264 A. 



134 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

dropped into poetry/' he was considerably more 
careful when he sat himself down to write " cold 
prose." Just as " Bully Bottom," fearing lest a lion 
should " fright the ladies," and " hang every mother's 
son " of his troupe, devised a prologue to explain that 
the lion was no lion, but only Snug the Joiner, "a 
man as other men are," so Master Ben Jonson, how- 
ever tropical and effusive as to his contemporary in 
his prosody, in his prologue in prose was scrupulous 
to leave only the truth behind him. Mountains — 
Ossa piled on Pelion — of hearsay and lapse of time ; 
oceans of mere opinion and "gush " would, of course, 
amount to precisely nothing at all when ranged along- 
side of the testimony of one single, competent, con- 
temporary eye-witness. T$o wonder the Shakespear- 
eans are eager to subpoena Ben Jonson's verses. But, 
all the same, they are marvelously careful not to sub- 
poena his prose. 

And yet this prose is extant, and by no means inac- 
cessible. When Jonson died, in 1637, he left behind 
him certain memoranda which were published in 1640, 
and are well-known as "Ben Jonson's Discoveries." 
One of these memoranda — for the work is in the dis- 
jointed form of a common-place book of occasional 
entries — is devoted to the eminent men of letters in 
the era spanned by its author's own acquaintance or 
familiarity. It runs as follows : 

Cicero is said to be the only wit that the people of Rome had 
equaled to their empire. Imperium par imperio. We have had 
many, and in their several ages (to take in the former sseculum), 
Sir Thomas More, the elder Wiat, Henry, Earl of Surry, Chah 
oner, Smith, Eliot, B. Gardiner, were, for their times, admirable; 
and the more because they began eloquence with us. Sir Nich* 



PART III. — THE JONSONIAN TESTIMONY. 135 

olas Bacon was singular and almost alone in the beginning of 
Elizabeth's time. Sir Philip Sidney and Mr. Hooker (in dif- 
ferent matter) grew great masters of wit and language, and 
in whom all vigour of invention and strength of judgment met. 
The Earl of Essex, noble and high, and Sir Walter Raleigh not 
to be contemned, either for judgment or style. Sir Henry Sa- 
ville, grave and truly lettered. Sir Edwin Sandys, excellent 
in both. Lord Egerton, a grave and great orator, and best when 
he was provoked. But his learned and able, but unfortunate succes- 
sor, is he that hath filled up all numbers, and performed that in our tongue 
which may be compared or preferred either to insolent Greece or haughty 
Rome. 1 In short, within this view, and about this time, were all 
the wits born that could honour a language or help study. Now 
things daily fall; wits grow downward and eloquence grows back- 
ward. So that he may be so named and stand as the mark and 
anyv of our language. 2 

Only fourteen years before, this Ben Jonson had 
published the verses which made William Shakespeare. 
Only fourteen years before he had asserted — what the 
world has taken his word for, and never questioned 
from that day to this — that his "best beloved" Wil- 
liam Shakespeare had been the " soul of the age" — 
"not for an age, but for all time" — and his works 
"such as neither man nor muse can praise too much !" 
We have no means of knowing the precise date at 
which Ben Jonson's grief for his dead friend cooled, 

Mudge Holmes ("Authorship of Shakespeare," third edition, 
p. 650) italicises these words to point the allusion to Bacon, and 
to notice that the passage in "The Discoveries," immediately pre- 
ceding the above, is a direct allusion to Bacon, while the phrase 
" insolent Greece and haughty Rome "occurs in line thirty-nine 
of the verses eulogistic of William Shakespeare. 

2 " Timber, or Discoveries made upon Men and Matter : as they 
have flowed out of his Daily Readings, or had their Reflux to his 
Peculiar Notion of the Time." By Ben Jonson. " Works," by 
Peter Whalley, vol. vii. , p. 99. 



136 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

and his feelings experienced a change. But he leaves 
behind him, at his death, this unembellished memoran- 
da, this catalogue " of all the wits " living in his day, 
who, in his opinion, " could honour a language or help 
study," and in this catalogue he inserts no such name 
as William Shakespeare; William Shakespeare, the 
name — not only of the "soul" and epitome of all that 
— only about fourteen years ago — he had deemed 
worth mentioning among men "born about this time;" 
but of his late most intimate and bosom friend! Had 
the "Discoveries" preserved an absolute silence con- 
cerning William Shakespeare, the passage we have 
quoted might, perhaps, have been considered a studied 
and deliberate slur on his dead friend's memory, on the 
part of Jonson, made for reasons best known to Jon- 
son himself. But they are not silent. They devote a 
whole paragraph to William Shakespeare — but in the 
proper place ; that is to say, not among " the wits who 
could honour a language or help study," but among 
the author's personal acquaintance. This is all there 
is of this paragraph as to the real William Shakes- 
peare : 

I remember the players have often mentioned it as an honor 
to Shakespeare, that in his writing (whatever he penned) he 
never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, " would he had 
blotted out a thousand!" which they thought a malevolent 
speech. I had not told posterity this but for their ignorance, 
who choose that circumstance to commend their friend by, 
wherein he most faulted. And to justify mine own candour (for 
I loved the man, and do honour his memory on this side idola- 
try, as much as any). He was (indeed) honest and of an open 
and free nature; had an excellent phantasie, brave notions, and 
gentle expressions: wherein he flowed with that facility that 
sometimes it was necessary he should be stopped. Sufflaminan- 



PART III. — THE JONSONIAN TESTIMONY. 137 

dus erat, as Augustus said of Haterius. His wit was in his own 
power, would that the rule of it had been so too ! Many times he 
fell into those things could not escape laughter ; as when he said 
in the person of Caesar — one speaking to him — " Caesar, thou dost 
me wrong;" he replied, "Caesar never did wrong, but with just 
cause," and such like ; which were ridiculous. But he redeemed 
his vices with his virtues. There was ever more in him to be 
praised than pardoned. 1 

That is every word which a man who " loved him " 
could say of William Shakespeare ! — that he was a 
skilled and careful penman, " never blotting out a 
line;" that he talked too fast, sometimes, and had to 
be checked; that, in playing the part of Caesar on the 
stage, somebody interpolated the speech, " Caesar, thou 
dost me wrong," and he made a bull in response ; 2 and 
that he (Jonson) wished he (Shakespeare) had blotted 
out a thousand of his lines. Blot out a thousand 
Shakespearean lines ! — a thousand of the priceless lines 
of the peerless book we call " Shakespeare!" Fancy 
the storm which would follow such a vandal proposi- 
tion to-day ! Ben Jonson does not specify which thou- 
sand he would have expurgated, but would be satisfied 
with any thousand, taken anywhere at random out of 
the writings of his " soul of the age," the man " not 
of an age, but for all time! " And yet it is on the un- 
corroborated word of this man Jonson that we build 
monuments to the Stratford lad, and make pilgrimages 
to his birthplace and worship his ashes, and quarrel 
about the spelling of his name ! If there is not a 

1 "Works," cited ante, vol. vii., p. 91. 

2 Possibly this may have occurred in playing the very version 
of the "Csesar" we now possess, though there are, of course, no 
such lines to be found there. 

12 



138 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

strong smack of patronage in this prose allusion to 
Shakespeare, we confess ourselves unable to detect its 
flavor. Very possibly the fact was that, so far from 
having been an admirer of William Shakespeare, Ben 
Jonson saw through his pretensions, and only through 
policy sang his praises against the stomach of his sense. 
For Ben Jonson, though one of the ripest scholars of 
the day (we have history as authority for that), was 
poor and a borrower, over head and ears in debt to 
Shakespeare ; he was a stock actor on the rich mana- 
ger's boards, and could not take the bread out of his 
own mouth. But the poor scholar, and still poorer 
actor, could yet indulge himself, and take his covert 
fling at the rich charlatan : 

u Though need make many poets, and some such 
As art and nature have not bettered much, 
Yet ours for want hath not so loved the stage 
As he dare serve the ill customs of the age : 
Or purchase your delight at such a rate 
As for it, he himself must justly hate. 
To make a child now swaddled, to proceed 
Man, and then shoot up in one beard and weed — 
Past threescore years, or with three rusty swords 
And help of some few foot and half foot words — 
Fight, over York and Lancaster's long jars, 
And in the tiring-house bring wounds to scars! 
He [that is, Ben himself] rather prays you will be pleased to see 
One such to-day, as other plays should be; 

[that is, one he wrote himself] 
Where neither chorus wafts you o'er the seas, 
Nor creaking throne comes down the boys to please." 

Ben says this himself — in the prologue to his " Every 
Man in his Humour." 

Again, in the "Induction" to his "Bartholomew 



PART III. — THE JONSONIAN TESTIMONY. 139 

Fair," he has this fling at " The Tempest : " ". If there 
be never a servant-monster in the fair, who can help 
it," he says, "nor a nest of antiques? He is loth to 
make Nature afraid in his plays, like those that beget 
tales, tempests, and such like drolleries." 1 

But that Jonson never himself believed, or expressed 
himself as believing, that William Shakespeare was a 
poet (except in this rhymed panegyric which Hemin- 
ges and Condell prefixed to the first folio), there is still 
further and perhaps stronger proof. Three years after 
William Shakespeare's death, Ben Jonson paid a visit to 
William Drummond of Hawthornden, and spent with 
him the greater part of the month of April, 1619 (or, 
as some fix it, the month of January, in that year). 
Drummond was a poet himself, and, it is said, his poet- 
ical reputation was what had attracted Jonson to 
make the visit. At any rate, he did visit him, and 
Drummond kept notes of Jonson's conversation. 
These notes are in the form of entries or items, 
grouped under Drummond's own headings or titles, 
such as : 

11 HIS ACQUAINTANCE AND BEHAVIOR WITH POETS LIVING WITH HIM." 

Daniel was at jealousies with him. 

Drayton feared him, and he esteemed not of him. 

That Francis Beaumont loved too much himself and his own 

verses. 

1 " The Tempest" of that day in William Shakespeare's hands, 
then, was a "drollery." See some curious evidence going to 
prove that, while the titles of the plays always remain the same, 
the plays themselves may have been different at different times. 
post VI, " The New Theory." Dr. Carl Elze (Essays on Shakes- 
peare. London. Macmillans. 1874), thinks that Jonson meant 
a hit at Shakespeare when he says, in Volpone, " all our English 
authors will steal." 



140 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

That Sir John Roe loved him ; and when they, too, were ush- 
ered by my Lord Suffolk from a mask, Roe wrott a moral Epistle 
to him which began : That next to Playes, the Court and the State were 
the best. God threateneth Kings, Kings Lords, (as) Lords do us. 

He beat Marston and took his pistol from him. 

Sir W. Alexander was not half kinde unto him, and neglected 
him, because a friend to Drayton. 

That Sir R. Aiton loved him dearly. 

Nid Field was his schollar, and he had read to him the satyres 
of Horace, and some Epigrames of Martiall. 

That Markam (who added his Arcadia) was not of the number 
of the Faithfull, (i. e Poets), and but a base fellow. 

That such were Day and Middleton. 

That Chapman and Fletcher were loved by him. 

Overbury was first his friend, then turn'd his mortall enimie." 

etc., etc. 

There are, in all, between two and three hundred 
entries of a similar character. JSTow, in one of these 
entries, Jonson is represented as saying that he " es- 
teemeth Done the first poet in the world in some 
things;" but there is nothing put in Jonson's mouth, 
in the whole category, about the " Star of Poets," 
save that, in another place, is the following item : 

" That Shakspeer wanted arte," 

and, further on, the following : 

" Shakespeare wrote a play, brought in a number of men say- 
ing they had suffered shipwreck in Bohemia, when there is no 
see neer by some 100 miles." x 

These notes were first printed by Mr. David Laing, 
who discovered them among the manuscripts of Sir 

1 Works of Ben Jonson. By William Grifford. Edited by Lt. 
Col. Francis Cunningham. Vol. III., p. 470. London. I. C. Hot- 
ten, 74 & 75 Picadilly. 



PART III. — THE JONSONIAN TESTMONY. 141 

Robert Sibbald, a well-known antiquary and physi- 
cian of Edinburgh. They were preserved in the form 
of a copy in Sibbald' 8 baud writing. Sibbald was a 
friend of the Bishop Sage, who edited Drummond's 
works in 1711. These notes were believed by Sir 
Walter Scott to be genuine, and, by his advice, were 
printed first in the "Archaeological Scotica," in or 
a bo ut 1723. At any rate, they were never printed by 
Sibbald himself, nor used by him in any way which 
suggested a motive for forgery, and, internally, they 
agree with Ben Jonson's own " Discoveries," especi- 
ally as to his (Jonson's) estimate of William Shakes- 
peare. 

This beneficiary of Shakespeare's (whom he honors 
this side idolatry, but whom Ave are not fearful of pass- 
ing the bounds of idolatry in worshiping to-day) — 
who declares that both Bacon and Shakespeare have 
surpassed all the heroic and tragic poets of Greece 
and Rome — is an overworked rhymester, who makes 
not only his tropes but his rhymes do double duty. 
The couplet: 

" Though need make many poets, and some such 
As art and nature have not bettered much " — 

needs only a little hammering over to become the 

"While I confess thy writings to be such 
As neither man nor muse can praise too much " — 

of the mortuary verses which— as we say — made 
Shakespeare Shakespeare. When the rich manager's 
alleged works were to be collected, the poor scholar, 
who had borrowed money of him in his lifetime, was 
called upon for a tribute. But the poor scholar for- 



142 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

bore to draw on the storehouse of his wits, though 
willing to hammer over some of his old verses for the 
occasion. He once assured posterity, in rhyme, that 
they must not "give nature all," but remember his 
gentle Shakespeare's art, how he would "sweat and 
strike the second heat upon the muse's anvil" (in 
other words, bring by long toil the firstlings of his 
genius to artificial perfection). And yet he deliberately 
tells Drummond, long years after, and puts it down in 
black and white over his own signature, that this same 
Shakespeare " wanted art," and that the great trouble 
with him was that he talked too much. Is it possible 
that the ideal Shakespeare, the mighty miracle-work- 
ing demigod, is only the accidental creation of a man 
who was poking fun at a shadow? Let us not pro- 
ceed to such a violent surmise, but return to a serious 
consideration of Mr. Ben Jonson's unimpassioned 
prose. 

If the paragraph from the " Discoveries" last above 
quoted — which estimates William Shakespeare pre- 
cisely as history estimates him, namely, as a clever 
fellow, and a player in one of the earliest theaters in 
London — is. not to be regarded as a confession that 
Ben Jonson's verses were written (or rewritten) more 
out of generosity to his late friend's memory — rather 
in the exuberance of a poetic license of apotheosis — 
than with a literal adherence to truth; 1 then it must be 
conceded that the result is such a facing both ways as 

*A confession, say the Baconians, that Jonson, as long as 
Bacon lived, was eager to serve him by shouldering on his in- 
cognito — in poetry — while he was under no compunction to do so 
in his own posthumous remains. See post V, The Baconian 
Theory. 



PART III. — THE JONSONIAN TESTIMONY. 143 

hangs any Jonsonian testimony in perfect equilibrium 
as to the Shakespearean controversy, and entitles Ben 
Jonson himself, as a witness for anybody or to any 
thing, to simply step down and out. For, admitting 
that his poetry is just as good as his prose — and prob- 
ably the Shakespeareans would care to assert no more 
than that — it is a legal maxim that a witness who 
swears for both sides swears for neither; and a rule 
of common law uo less than of common sense that 
his evidence must be ruled out, since no jury can be 
called upon to believe and disbelieve one and the same 
witness at the same time. And so we are relieved 
from accounting for the " Jonson testimony," as did 
Lord Palmerston, by saying : " 0, those fellows always 
hang together; or, its just possible Jonson may have 
been deceived like the rest;" 1 or by asking ourselves 
if a score of rhymes by Ben Jonson, a fellow crafts- 
man (not sworn to, of course, and not nearly as tropi- 
cal or ecstatic as they might have been, and yet been 
quite justifiable under the rule nil nisi) — are to out- 
weigh all historic certainty? If Jonson had written a 
life, or memoir, or "recollections," or "table-talk," of 
William Shakespeare, it might have been different. 
But he only gives us a few cheap lines of poetical 
eulogy; and eact is one thing, and poetry — unless 
there is an exception in this instance — is conceded to 
be altogether another. 

But since numberless good people are suspicious of 
rules of law as applied to evidence, regarding them as 
over-nice, finical, and as framed rather to keep out 
truth than to let it in, let us waive the legal maxim, 

1 Frazer's Magazine, November, 1865, p. 666. 



144 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

and admit the Jonsonian testimony to be one single, 
consistent block of contemporary evidence. But, no 
sooner do we do this, than we find ourselves straight- 
way floundering in a slough of absurdities far greater, 
it seems to us, than any we have yet encountered. To 
illustrate : It is necessary to the Shakespearean theory 
that in the days of Elizabeth and James there should 
have been not only a man, but a genius, a wit, and a 
poet, of thename of "William Shakespeare; and that 
all these — man, genius, wit, and poet — should have 
been one and the same individual. Taking all the 
Jonsonian testimony, prose and poetry, together, such 
an individual there was, and his name was William 
Shakespeare, as required. But — still following Jon- 
son's authority — at the same period and in the same 
town of London there was a certain gentleman named 
Bacon, who was "learned and able," and who had, 
moreover, " filled up all numbers — and" in the same 
days "performed that which may be compared either 
to insolent Greece or haughty Rome." We have, 
then, not only a " wit and poet" named Shakespeare, 
but a " wit and poet" named Bacon; and, since Jon- 
son is nowhere too modest to admit that he himself 
was a " wit and poet," we have, therefore, actually 
not one but three of a kind, at each other's elbows in 
London, in the golden age of English literature. We 
have already seen that, of this trio, two — Bacon and 
Shakespeare, if we are to believe the Shakespeareans 
— were personally unknown to each other. It is 
worth our while to pause right here, and see what this 
statement involves. 

They are all three — Bacon, Jonson, and Shakes- 
peare — dwelling in the same town at the same mo- 



PART lit. — THE JONSONIAN TESTIMONY. 145 

ment ; are, all three, writers and wits, earning their 
living by their pens. Ben Jonson is the mutual 
friend. He is of service to both — he translates Bacon's 
English into Latin for him, 1 and writes plays for 
William Shakespeare's stage, and, as we have seen, he 
ultimately becomes the Boswell of both, and runs 
from one to the other in rapture. His admiration for 
Bacon, on the one hand (according to his prose), 
amounts to a passion; his admiration for Shakespeare, 
on the other hand (according to his poetry), amounts 
to a passion. He declares (in prose) that Bacon " hath 
filled up all numbers, and performed that in our tongue, 
which may be compared and preferred either to in- 
solent Greece or haughty Home." He declares (in poetry) 
of Shakespeare that he may be left alone — 

"... for comparison 
Of all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome 
Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come." 

And yet he never, while going from one to the 
other, mentions Shakespeare to Bacon or Bacon to 
Shakespeare; never "introduces" them or brings 
them together; never gives his soul's idol Bacon any 
" order" to his soul's idol Shakespeare's theater, that 
this absolutely inimitable Bacon (who has surpassed 
insolent Greece and haughty Rome) may witness the 
masterpieces of this absolutely inimitable Shakespeare 

1 Jonson assisted Dr. Hackett, afterward Bishop of Litchfield 
and Coventry, in translating the essays of Lord Bacon into Latin. 
(Whalley, " Life of Ben Jonson," Vol. I. of works, cited ante.) 
Jonson was at this time " on terms of intimacy with Lord 
Bacon." — (W. H. Smith, " Bacon and Shakespeare," p. 29.) 
13 



146 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

(who has likewise surpassed insolent Greece and 
haughty Rome) ; this Boswell of a Jonson, go-be- 
tween of two men of repute and public character, 
travels from one to the other, sings the praises of each 
to the world outside (using the same figures of speech 
for each), and, in the presence of each, preserves so 
impenetrable a silence as to the other, that of the two 
public characters themselves each is absolutely ignor- 
ant of the other's existence ! And yet they ought to 
have been close friends, for they borrowed each other's 
verses, and loaned each other paragraphs to any ex- 
tent. Persons there have been who asser'ed, as we 
shall see, on merely the internal evidence of their 
writings, that Bacon and " Shakespeare " were one 
and the same man, and that what appeared to be "par- 
allelisms " and coincidences in Bacon and " Shakes- 
peare" were thus to be accounted for. But, admit- 
ting their separate identity, it is certain either that 
the natural philosopher borrowed his exact facts from 
the comedies of the playwright, or that the playwright 
borrowed the speeches for his comedies from the na- 
tural philosopher; either of which looks very much 
like, at least, a speaking acquaintance. For, as we 
shall see further on, 1 some of these "parallelisms" are 
not coincidences, but something very like identities. 

It will not lighten this new difficulty to rnle out the 
prose and leave in the poetry, for we can not anni- 
hilate Francis Bacon nor yet William Shakespeare 
from their places in history. If, however, the Jonson- 
ian poetry ivere wiped out, the Jonsonian prose would 
receive, at least, a negative corroboration, as follows: 

1 Post, part V, The Baconian Theory. 



PART III. — THE JONSONIAN TESTIMONY. 147 

At the same time that Bacon and Shakespeare are liv- 
ing, unknown to each other respectively, in London, 
there also dwell there three other gentlemen — Sir 
Walter Raleigh, Edmund Spenser, and Sir Tobie 
Matthew. We, therefore, actually have four well- 
known gentlemen of the day in London, gentlemen 
of elegant tastes — poets, men about town, critics — who, 
if the town were being convulsed by the production 
at a theater of by far the most brilliant miracles of 
genius that the world had ever seen, ought not, in the 
nature of things, to have been utterly uninformed as 
to the circumstance. We do not add to this list South- 
ampton, Essex, Rutland, Montgomery, and the rest, 
because these latter have left no memorandum or 
chronicle of what they saw and heard on manuscript 
behind them. But the first four have left just pre- 
cisely such memoranda of their times as are of assist- 
ance to us here. Bacon, in his " Apothegms," Spenser 
in his poems, 1 and Raleigh and Matthew in their re- 

1 Spenser's well-known lines in "Colin Clout's come Home 
again," written in 1591, are: 

•' And there, though last not least, is Aetion, 
A gentler shepherd may nowhere he found , 
Whose muse, full of high thought's invention, 
Doth— life himself— heroically sound." 

"jEton" is generally assumed by commentators to stand in 
the verse for " Shakespeare." But it is difficult to imagine how 
this can possibly be more than mere speculation, since Spenser 
certainly left no annotation explanatory of the passage, and it 
does not identify itself as a reference to Shakespeare. In " The 
Tears of the Muses," line 205, there is an allusion which on a 
first glance appears so pat, that the Bard of Avon has long been 
called " our pleasant Willy " on the strength of it. It runs : 

" A.nd he, the man whom Nature's self had made, 
To mock herself and truth to imitate 



148 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

mains — especially Matthew — who, like Bacon, kept a 
diary, who wrote letters and postscripts, and was as 
fond of playing at Boswell to his favorites as Jonson 
himself — appear to have stumbled on no trace of such 
a character as "Shakespeare" in all their saunterings 
about London. Especially on one occasion does Sir 
Tobie devote himself to a subject-matter wherein, if 
there had been any "Shakespeare" within his ken, 
lie could very properly — and would, we think, very 
naturally — have mentioned him. In the " Address to 
the Reader," prefixed to one of his works, l he says, 
speaking of his ow T n date, " We have also rare com- 
positions made among us which look so many fair 
ways at once that I doubt it will go near to pose any 
other nations of Europe to muster out in ai^ age four 
men who, in so many respects, should be able to excel 

With kindly counter under mirnick shade, 
Our pleasant Willy, ah, is dead of late ; 
With whom all joy and jolly merriment 
Is also deaded, and in dolour drent." 

But, since Spenser died some seventeen years before Shake- 
speare, and if — as must be supposed from their flippancy — these 
lines point to the enforced or voluntary retirement or silence of 
some writer, rather than to his death — they appear more nearly 
to refer to Sidney than to Shakespeare. And this now appears 
to be conceded. (See Morley's "English Men of Letters: Spens- 
er," by Dean Church. American edition, Harpers, New York, 
1879, p. 106.) Besides, "The Tears of the Muses" was written 
in 1580, when Shakespeare was a lad of sixteen, holding horses 
at the theater door. " Will," or " Willy," appears to have been 
the ordinary nickname of a poet in those days-. — E. G\ White's 
"Shakespeare," vol i., p. 57, note.) 

1 " A Collection of Letters made by Sir Tobie Matthew, with a 
Character of the Most Excellent Lady Lucy, Countess of Car- 
lisle. To which are added Many Letters of his Several Persons 
of Honour, who were contemporary with him." London, 1660. 



PART III. — THE JONSONIAN TESTIMONY. 149 

four such as we are able to show — Cardinal Wolsey, 
Sir Thomas More, Sir Philip Sidney, and Sir Francis 
Bacon. For they were all a kind of monsters in their 
various ways," etc. 

Besides, these four — or, dismissing Spenser, who 
was a poet exclusively — then three, Bacon, Raleigh, and 
Tobie Matthew — however else dissimilar, were any 
thing but blockheads or anchorites. They were men 
of the court and of the world. They mingled among 
their fellow-men, and (by a coincidence which is very 
useful to us here) none of them were silent as to what 
they met and saw during, their careers. They both 
live and move in the very town and in the very days 
when this rare poetry which Emerson says "the great- 
est minds value most" was appearing. But, if Wil- 
liam Shakespeare was the author of it all, how is it 
possible to escape the conviction that not one of them 
all— not Bacon, a man of letters himself, a student of 
antique not only, but of living and contemporary lit- 
erature, and overfond of writing down his impressions 
for the benefit of posterity (even if wanting in the 
dramatic or poetic perception, the scholarship of the 
plays could not have escaped him; and had these plays 
been the delight and town talk of all London, as Mr. 
Grant White says they were, some morsel of them 
must have reached his ear or eye) — not Raleigh, court- 
ier, gallant, man-about-town, "curled darling," and 
every thing of that sort (who probably was not afraid 
to go to a theater for fear of injuring his morals) — not 
Tobie Matthew, who was all this latter with less of 
responsibility and mental balance — ever so much as 
heard his (Shakespeare's) name mentioned ? That not 
one of these ever heard of a name that was in every- 



150 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

body's mouth — of a living man so famous that, as we 
shall presently consider, booksellers were using his 
name to make their wares sell, that his plays were fill- 
ing the most fashionable theater in London from cock- 
pit to the dome; whose popularity was so exalted that 
the great Queen Elizabeth herself stepped down from 
the throne and walked across his stage to do him 
honor, to whom in after days, her successor King was 
to write an autograph letter (for these must all be con- 
sidered in the argument, though, as we have seen, the 
King James story is only one of the " yarns," 1 cooked 
for occasion by commentators, or the growth of rumor 
— in orthodox procession from " might have been" to 
"was" — and so, doubtless, is the other) is a trifle in- 
credible to a mind not already adjusted to swallow any 
and every fable in this connection' rather than accept 
the truth of history ! To be sure, it is not absolutely 
impossible that these three men should have been cog- 
nizant of William Shakespeare's existence without 
mentioning him in their favors to posterity. But, under 
all the circumstances, it is vastly improbable. At any 
rate, we fancy it would not be easy to conceive of 

x The story of Elizabeth's order for " FalstafF in Love," result- 
ing in the production of " The Merry Wives of Windsor" (which 
would prove that, whatever else she was, Elizabeth was no An- 
thony Comstock), is, to our mind, another sample of the same 
procession. Hazlitt (Lit. of Europe, Part iii., chap. 6, sec. iii., 
note,) is especially incredulous as to the King James letter. The 
truth is that Shakespeare, far from being flattered by James, was 
actually in disgrace, and not so much as to be mentioned in that 
monarch's hearing, from having permitted a representation of the 
sacred person of royalty on his stage, as is authenticated by the 
well-known lines of Davies: 

Hadst thou not played some Kingly parts in sport, etc., etc. 



PART III. — THE JONSONIAN TESTIMONY. 151 

three Englishmen in London to-day, in 1881 — let us 
say Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Browning, and Mr. Swinburne 
— without collusion, writing down a list of their most 
illustrious contemporaries, and not one of them men- 
tioning Mr. Tennyson! Or, assuming that Tennyson 
is the admitted first of poets of the Victorian age (as 
Mr. Ben Jonson and all the commentators at his heels, 
down to our own Mr. Grant White, tell us that " Wil- 
liam Shakespeare" was the admitted first of poets of 
his contemporary Elizabethan age), it would not be 
the easiest thing in the world to conceive three chron- 
iclers — Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Browning, and Mr. Swin- 
burne—sitting themselves down to an enumeration, 
not of their illustrious contemporaries in general, but 
of their contemporaneous men of letters only, and, by 
a coincidence, omitting any mention of the great first 
of poets of their day! Either, then, it seems to us we 
are to infer that three such men as Raleigh, Bacon, 
(who, Emerson says, "took the inventory of the hu- 
man understanding, for his time,") and his satellite 
Matthew, had never so much as heard that there was 
any Shakespeare, in an age which we moderns wor- 
ship as the age of Shakespeare, or that there was no 
" Shakespeare" for them to hear about; that "Wil- 
liam Shakespeare" was the name of an actor and man- 
ager in the Globe and Blackfriars play-houses, of a 
man not entitled, any more than any of his co-actors 
and co-managers in those establishments, to enumera- 
tion among the illustrious ornaments of an illustrious 
age, the stars of the golden age of English ! 

Of course, it can be well urged that all this is mere 
negative evidence; that not only three but three mil- 
lion of men might be found who had never mentioned 



152 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

or ever heard of Shakespeare, without affecting the 
controversy either way. But, under the circumstances, 
in view of what the Shakespearean plays are, and of 
what their author must have been, and of when and 
where these three men — Bacon, Raleigh, and Matthew 1 
— lived and flourished, the chronicles left by these 
three men — Bacon, Ealeigh, and Matthew — constitute, 
at the very least, a "negative pregnant" not to be 
omitted in any review of our controversy that can lay 
the faintest claim to exhaustiveness or sincerity; and, 
moreover, a negative pregnant which — if we admitted 
all the Ben Jonson testimony, in prose and poetry, as 
evidence on the one side — could not be excluded as evi- 
dence on the other. In which event it is fairest to the 
Shakespeareans to rule Ben out altogether. 2 Besides, 
Ben is what the Scotchmen call "a famous witness" 
(if the commentators, who enlarge on Shakespeare's 
bounty and loans to him, can be relied upon), as being 
under heavy pecuniary obligation to the stage mana- 
ger, and so his testimony is to be scrutinized with the 

J And we might add to these Sir John Davies, Selden, Sir John 
Beaumont, Henry Vaughn, Lord Clarendon and others. 

2 It is fair to note that another " negative pregnant" arises here, 
to which the Shakespeareans are as fairly entitled as the other 
side to theirs. Sir Tobie Matthew died in 1655. He survived 
Shakespeare thirty-nine years, Bacon twenty-nine years, and Ral- 
eigh thirty-seven years! Left in possession of the secret of 
the Baconian authorship, how could such a one as Matthew 
let the secret die with him ? Although we do not meet with it 
among the arguments of the Shakespeareans, this strikes us as 
about the strongest they could present, except that the answer 
might be that at the date of Matthew's death, 1655, the Shakes- 
pearean plays were not held in much repute, or that Matthew 
might have reserved his unbosoming of the secret too long; but 
it is only one fact among a thousand. 



PAKT III. — THE JONSONIAN TESTIMONY. 153 

greatest care, though he certainly did not allow his 
obligations to over- master him when writing the "Dis- 
coveries." But, in any event, it would be easier to be- 
lieve that Ben Jonson once contradicted himself for 
the sake of a rhyme, and to "do the handsome thing" 
by the memory of an old friend and unpaid creditor, 
than to swallow the incredible results of a literal ver- 
sion of his prose and poetry, read by the light of the 
Bacon, Raleigh, and Matthew remains. And the con- 
clusion of the matter, it seems to us, must be: either 
that the poetry was the result of his obligations to 
William Shakespeare and to William Shakespeare's 
memory, or that, having sworn on both sides, Mr. Ben 
Jonson stands simply dehors the case — a witness for 
neither. 

It is not, then — it is very far from being — because 
we know so little of the man Shakespeare that we 
disbelieve in his authorship of the great works as- 
cribed to him. It is because we know so much. No 
sooner did men open their histories, turn up the rec- 
ords and explore the traditions and trace the gossip 
of the Elizabethan days, than the facts stared them in 
the face. Long before any " Baconian theory " arose 
to account for these anomalies: at the instant these 
plays began to be valued for any thing else than their 
theatrical properties, the difficulty of "marrying the 
man to his verse" began to be troublesome. " To be 
told that he played a trick on a brother actor in a 
licentious amour, or that he died of a drunken frolic, 
does not exactly inform us of the man who wrote 
' Lear,'" cried Mr. Hallam. 1 "Every accession of in- 

1 " I laud," says Hallam, " the labors of Mr. Collier, Mr. Hunter, 
and other collectors of such crumbs, though I am not sure that 



154 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

formation we obtain respecting the man Shakespeare 
renders it more and more difficult to detect in him the 
poet," cries Mr. "William Henry Smith. 1 "I am one 
of the many," testifies Mr. Furness, " who have never 
been able to bring the life of William Shakespeare 
and the plays of Shakespeare within a planetary space 
of each other; are there any other two things in the 
world more incongruous ? " 2 It was necessary, there- 
fore, ill order to preserve a belief in the Shakespearean 
authorship, either that William Shakespeare should 
be historically known as a man of great mental power, 
a close student of deep insight into nature and morals 
— a poet, philosopher, and all the rest — or else that, by 
a failure of the records, history should be silent alto- 
gether as to his individuality, and the lapse of time 
have made it impossible to recover any details what- 
ever as to his tastes, manners, and habits of life. In 
such a case, of course, there would remain no evidence 
on the subject other than that of the plays themselves, 
which would, of course, prove him precisely the myri- 
ad-minded genius required. In other words, it was 
only necessary to so cloud over the facts as to make the 
" Shakespearean miracle" to be, not that William 
Shakespeare had written the works, but — that history 
should be so silent concerning a " Shakespeare ! " So 
long as the Shakespeareans could cry, u Behold a mys- 

we should not venerate Shakespeare as much if they had left 
him undisturbed in his obscurity. ... If there was a Shake- 
speare of earth, as I suspect, there was also one of heaven, and 
it is of him we desire to know something." 

1 " Bacon and Shakespeare," p. 886. 

2 In a letter to Judge Holmes, printed at p. 628, third edition, 
of the latter's " Authorship of Shakespeare." 



PART III. — THE JONSONIAN TESTIMONY. 155 

terious dispensation of Providence — that, of the two 
mightiest poets the world lias ever held — Homer and 
William Shakespeare — we know absolutely nothing ! " 
— so long as they could assign this silence to the havoc 
of a great deluge or a great fire, just so long the name 
"William Shakespeare" was as good and satisfactory 
a name as any other, and nobody could propose a bet- 
ter. But they can cry so no longer. It is not because 
we know so little, but because we know so much about 
the Stratford boy, that we decline to accept him as the 
master we not only admire and love, but in whose 
pages we find our wisdom vain and our discovery an- 
ticipated. As a matter of fact, through the accident 
of his having been a part-proprietor in one of the 
earliest English play-houses, we know pretty accu- 
rately what manner of man he was. We know almost 
every thing -about him, in short, except — what we do 
know about Homer — that the works now attributed to 
him were his. Homer, at least, we can trace to his 
" Iliad" and his " Odyssey," as he sang them in frag- 
ments from town to town. But neither to his own pen 
nor his own lips, and only problematically (as we shall 
see further on) to his own stage, can we trace the plays 
so long assigned to William Shakespeare. Let the 
works be placed in our hands for the first time anony- 
mously; given the chronicles of the age of Eliza- 
beth and James in which to search for an author of 
these works, would any thing we found in either lead 
us to pronounce William Shakespeare their author? 
And has any thing happened since to induce us to set 
aside the record and substitute an act of pure faith, of 
faith blind and obedient, and make it almost a religion 
to blindly and obediently believe that William Shakes- 



156 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

peare was not the man he was, lest we should be " dis- 
respectful to our birthright?" 

Nothing whatever has happened since, except the 
labors of the commentators. By the most painfully 
elaborate explorations on the wrong track, by ingeni- 
ous postulation upon fictitious premises, and by divers 
illicit processes of majors and minors, while steering 
carefully clear of the records, they have evolved a 
butcher, a lawyer, a physician, a divinity student, a 
a schoolmaster, a candlestick-maker — but, after all, a 
Shakespeare. That the error, in the commencement, 
was the result of carelessness, there can be no doubt. 
But that, little by little — each commentator, either in 
rivalry for a new fact, and jealous to bo one item ahead 
of his competitor (even if obliged to invent it out of 
hand), or being too indolent to examine for himself, 
or too subservient to authority to rebel — it grew to 
vast proportions, we have only to look at the huge 
" biographies " of the last half century to be assured. 
It will not detain us long, as an example of these, to 
briefly glance at the labors of one of the most intrepid 
of the ilk to identify the traditional poet with the 
traditional man. In 1839, Thomas De Quincy con- 
tributed to the "Encyclopaedia Britannica" its ar- 
ticle " Shakespeare." That about the story of the 
prankish Stratford lad, who loved, and wooed and 
won a farmer's daughter, and between the low, smoky- 
raftered cottage in Stratford town and the snug little 
thatch at Shottery trudged every sunset to do his 
courting, there lingers the glamour of youth, and love, 
and poetry, no patron of the "Encyclopaedia" would 
probabl} 7 have doubted. But that a staid and solemn 
work, designed for exact reference, should have printed 



PART III. — THE JONSONIAN TESTIMONY. 157 

so whimsical a fancy sketch as Mr. De Quincy sup- 
plied to it, and that it should have been allowed to re- 
maiu there, must certainly command surprise. There 
can surely be complaint as to the variety of the per- 
formance. Mr. De Quincy very ably and gravely spec- 
ulates as to the size of the dowry old Hathaway gave 
his daughter; as to whether old John Shakespeare 
mortgaged his homestead to keep up appearances; and 
whether that gentleman received the patronage of 
Stratford corporation when (as there is no direct au- 
thority for saying they did uot) they had occasion to 
present a pair of gloves to some favored nobleman 
(and this portion of the composition winds up with a 
history of gloves and glove-making which cannot fail 
to interest and instruct the reader). And his specu- 
lations as to whether the messengers who sped to 
Worcester for the " marriage-lines " did or did not ride 
in such hot haste, in view of an expected but prema- 
ture Susannah, that they gave vicious orthographies 
of the names " Shakspeare" and "Hathaway" to the 
aged clerk who drew the document, are, especially 
pretty reading. But — with facilities in 1839 for writ- 
ing a history of the Stratford lad, which the Stratford 
lad's own contemporaries and near neighbors, two hun- 
dred years and more before Mr. De Quincy, seem never 
to have possessed — Mr. J)e Quincy quite surpasses him- 
self in setting us exactly right as to William Shakes- 
peare. And, first, as to the birthday. There has al- 
ways been a sort of feeling among Englishmen that 
their greatest poet ought to have had no less a birth- 
day than the clay dedicated to their patron saint. The 
Stratford parish records certifying to the christening 
of William Shakespeare on the 26th day of April, 



158 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

1564 (which Mr. De Quincy forgets was " old style," 
and so, in any event, twelve days before the corres- 
ponding date in the present or " new style"), and the 
anniversary of St. George being fixed for celebration 
on the 23d of April, it had come to be unanimously 
resolved by the commentators that, in Warwickshire, 
it. was the custom to christen infants on the third 
day after birth, and that, therefore, William Shakes- 
peare was born on the anniversary of St. George, 
April 23, 1564. To baptise a three-days-old baby, 
in an English April, at a period five days earlier 
than, in. the mild latitude of Palestine, the Israelites 
thought it necessary to circumcise their infants, seems 
a very un-English proceeding. So Mr. De Quincy, 
who would rather perish than mislead, thinks, after 
all, the birth might have been a day earlier. "After 
all," he says, " William might have been born on the 
22d. Only one argument," he gravely proceeds, '•' has 
sometimes struck us for supposing that the 22d might 
be the day, and not the 23d, which is, that Shakes- 
peare's sole granddaughter, Lady Barnard, was mar- 
ried on the 22d of April, ten years exactly from the 
poet's death, aud the reason for choosing this clay 
might have had a reference to her illustrious grand- 
father's birthday, which, there is good reason for think- 
ing, would be celebrated as a festival in the familv 
for generations! " But even Mr. De Quincy appears 
to concede that, in writing history, we must draw the 
line somewhere ; for he immediately adds, "Still this 
choice may have been an accident " (so many things, 
that is to say, are likely to be considered in fixing a 
marriage-day, besides one's grandfather's birthday !), 
u or governed merely by reason of convenience. And, 



PART III. — THE JONSONIAN TESTIMONY. 159 

on the whole, it is as well, perhaps, to acquiesce in the 
old belief that Shakespeare was born and died on the 
23d of April. We can not do wrong if we drink to his 
memory both on the 22d and 23d." 1 Mr. De Quincy's 
proposition to drink twice instead of once ought to 
forever secure his popularity among Englishmen; but 
it remains, nevertheless, remarkable that a ponderous 
encyclopaedia should admit this sort of work among its 
articles on sugar, snakes, Sardinia, soap, Savonarola, 
and its other references in SI Like his fellow Shakes- 
peareans, Mr. De Quincy makes no use of Aubrey, 
or the old clerk, or tbe Rev. Richard Davies, or 
any one else who, having lived at dates inconven- 
iently contiguous to the real William Shakespeare, 
were aw 7 kward customers about whom it was best 
to say nothing. He cannot claim never to have 
heard of Aubrey, because he quotes him as saying 
that William Shakespeare was " a handsome, well- 
shaped man." But this is the only allusion he makes 
to Aubrey or to any body else who lived within eye- 
sight or ear-shot of the William Shakespeare who (we 
admit), if a well-conducted person, ought reasonably to 
have been the man Mr. De Quincy and his ilk turn 
him out, and not the man his neighbors, or any body 
who happened to be born within a hundred years 

1 Mr. De Quincy's own estimate of this performance we take 
from a preface to the article itself, in the American edition of 
his collected works (Boston: Shepard & Gill, 1873), vol. xv., p. 
11: "No paper ever cost me so much labor; parts of it have 
been recomposed three times over." And again, "William 
Shakespeare's article cost me more intense labor than any I 
ever wrote in my life and, I believe, if you will examine it, you 
will not complain of want of novelty." We should say not. 



160 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

of him, knew him. As to the difficulties Cole- 
ridge, Goethe, Schlegel, Richter, Carlyle, Palmerston, 
Emerson, Gervinius, Hallam, Holmes, William Henry 
Smith, Furness, and Delia Bacon find so insurmount- 
able — namely, as to where the material of the plays 
came from — Mr. De Quincy skips over these with 
his airy two terms at the little grammar-school on 
Stratford High Street! (The identical desk which 
William occupied during this period of attendance at 
that institution of learning was promptly supplied by 
the Stratford guides, upon hearing Mr. De Quincy's 
discovery.) " Old Aubrey," two hundred years nearer 
his subject, was careful to give his school-master's 
story "for what it was worth," admitting that his 
authority for the statement that William Shakespeare 
was a school-master was only a rumor, founded on the 
statement of one " Beeston ; " but who was " Bee- 
ston? " Some of our modern commentators have con- 
jectured that possibly William, being a sort of model 
or head boy, was trusted to hear some of the little 
boys' lessons, which gave rise to the " school-master " 
story. But Mr. De Quincy allows no demurrer nor 
doubt to his assertions in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. 
And for these "two terms" (of course), no further 
authority than himself being necessary, he vouchsafes 
none. Such dry things as references are gracefully 
compensated for by favoring the reader in search for 
Shakespearean data with two dissertations upon 
the loveliness of female virtue, one of which covers 
fourteen pages octavo. 1 His cue has had prolific fol- 

x Of Sheppard & Gill's reprint (pp. 41, 69-83). But if Mr. De 
Quincy could have lived until November, 1879, even he might 
have been taught something. The Eev. John Bayley, in an 



PART III. — THE JONSONIAN TESTIMONY. 161 

lowing. Eow-a-days our "biographies" of William 
Shakespeare are huge tomes of Elizabethan and 
other antiquarian lore, commentary, conjecture, argu- 
mentation ; that stupefy us, as it were, by mere bulk 
and show of research, into accepting the whole rather 
than plunge into so vast and shoreless a sea of appa- 
rent labor, and, therefore, alleged learning. For such 
is the indolence of man, that the bulkier the book the 
less likely is it to be read or refuted. And so, in 
view of the great eye-filling books labeled " biogra- 
phies" of William Shakespeare — volumes commensu- 
rate with the idea of a life which might, in time at 
least, have compassed the mighty works — one need 
not doubt that " William Shakespeare " was the 
name of the marvelous man who wrote the plays. 

But, when one left the fiction of Mr. De Quincy and 
his ilk, and was forced to confront the William 
Shakespeare who wrote the Lucy lampoon and the 
epitaph on Elias James, who stuck calves and stole 

article on " The Religion of Shakespeare," in the " Sunday Maga- 
zine" (New York: Frank Leslie, November, 1879, p. 518), says 
of William Shakespeare," " During the last years of his life it is 
stated that he and his family attended the parish church where 
the Rev. Richard Byfield, an eminent Puritan minister, and 
father of the distinguished commentator on the Epistle to the 
Colossians, commenced his ministry, a. d. 1606." Of course, the 
reverend contributor to the "Sunday Magazine" does not in- 
form us where this fact " is stated," but concludes from the fact 
(he is sure it is a fact) that Shakespeare was " during the last 
years of his life the constant hearer of this eminent and ener- 
getic preacher of the gospel," and that " we may reasonably 
hope for the best of consequences." So simple a process has 
Shakespeare-making become ! 
14 



162 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

deer, the difficulty only recurred with redoubled em- 
phasis. 

It is not, of course, because William stuck the 
calves and stole the deer, because he wrote the 
lampoon or the epitaph, nor because he was son (or 
apprentice, as some say), to a butcher or a glover, a 
tallow-chandler or a seedsman, that he is conceived to 
have been unequal to the Shakespearean authorship. 
There never yet was cradle too lowly to be the cradle 
of genius, or line too ignoble for its genesis. George 
Stephenson was a colliery-stoker, Turner was the son 
of a barber, and Faraday the son of a horseshoer. 
Coleridge was a charity-lad, and the number of tan- 
ners' and tallow-chandlers' offspring, without whose 
names history could not be written, is something amaz- 
ing. We may trace the genius of Turner from the first 
impulse of his pencil to its latest masterpiece, but we 
can not find that he discovered the solar spectrum or 
described the Edison phonograph. He knew and 
practiced what he was taught (albeit he taught him- 
self), and died quite contented to leave his own works 
behind him. Robert Burns was fully as unlettered 
and as rustic a plowboy as could be desired to prove 
the mighty miracle of genius. His history, up to a 
certain point, is the very duplicate of the history of 
William Shakespeare, the butcher's boy and prodigy 
of Stratford village. Both were obscure, schoolless, 
and grammarless. But, in the case of Robert Burns, 
this heaven-born genius did not set him straightway 
on so lofty a pinnacle that he could circumspect the 
past, and forecast the future, or guide his untaught 
pen to write of Troy and Egypt, of Athens and 
Cyprus, or to reproduce the very counterfeit civiliza- 



PART III. — THE JONSONIAN TESTIMONY. 163 

tions and manners of nations born and buried and 
passed into history a thousand years before he had 
been begotten, the very names of which were not 
dreamed of anywhere in the neighborhood of his 
philosophy; of the most unusual and hidden details 
of forgotten polities and commercial customs, such as, 
for instance, the exceptional usage of a certain trade 
in Mitylene, the anomalous status of a Moorish mer- 
cenary in command of a Venetian army, of a savage 
queen of Britain led captive by Rome, or a thane of 
Scotland under one of its primitive kings — matters of 
curious aud occult research for antiquaries or dilettante 
to dig out of old romances or treatises or statutes, 
rather than for historians to treat of or schools to 
teach ! In the case of Eobert Burns we are content 
not to ask too much, even of genius. Let us be con- 
tent if the genius of Robert Burns could glorify the 
goodwives' fables of his wonted firesides and set in 
aureole the homeliest cipher in his vicinage, until a 
field-mouse became a poem or a milkmaid a Venus! 
It were unreasonable to demand that this genius, this 
fire from heaven, at once and on the instant invest a 
letterless peasant-lad with all the lore and law which 
the ages behind him had shut up in clasped books and 
buried and forgotten — with all the learning that the 
past had gathered into great tomes and piled away in 
libraries. And yet, if Robert Burns had sung of the 
Punic wars or the return of the Heraclides, some 
Malone or DeQuincy or Charles Knight would doubt- 
less — with history staring him in the face — have arisen 
to put his index-finger upon the sources of his au- 
thority. Judging by the record in the case of William 
Shakespeare, history is able to oppose no difficulty 



164 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

over which a Malone or DeQuincy or Charles Knight 
can not easily clamber. 

If William Shakespeare was a born genius, a true 
son of nature, his soul overflowing with a sense of 
the beauty of life and of love, and of all around him, 
we might expect to find his poems brimful of the 
sweet, downcast eyes of his Anne, of sunny Stratford 
fields, of Shottery and the lordly oaks of Charlecote 
— to find him, " Fancy's child," w T arbling " his native 
wood-notes wild," indeed ! But of Troy, Tyre, and 
Epidamnium, of Priam and Cressid and Cleopatra, of 
the propulsion of blood from the vital heart, and of 
the eternal mysteries of physics, who dreams that 
" sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy's child " could sing in 
the very speech and idiom of those forgotten towns 
and times, or within the mathematical exactitude of 
sciences that had not yet been treated of in books? 
Or, again, John Bunyan is a case in point. John 
Bunyan was as squalid and irredeemable a tinker as 
ever flourished in the days when " a tinker was a rogue 
by statute." l And yet he, according to Macaulay, pro- 
duced the second of the two books of which England 
should be proudest. 2 What was the miracle in the case 
of John Bunyan ? He produced a book which, " while 
it obtains admiration from the most fastidious critics, 
is loved by those who are too simple to admire it. . . . 
This is the highest miracle of art, that things which 

Cockayne vs. Hopkins, 2 Lev., 214. 

2 " Though there were many clever men in England during the 
latter half of the seventeenth century, there were only two minds 
which possessed the imaginative faculty in a very eminent de- 
gree. One of these minds produced the ' Paradise Lost,' and 
the other the ' Pilgrim's Progress.' " 



PART III. — THE JONSONIAN TESTIMONY. 165 

are not should be as though they were; that the im- 
aginations of one mind should become the personal 
recollections of another. And this miracle the tinker 
has wrought." But this great praise was not abstracted 
from Macaulay by wealth of antique learning, univer- 
sal accuracy of information, or vivid portraiture of 
forgotten civilizations. There was no trace of Bun- 
yan's perfect familiarity with Plato and Euripides, 
with Galen, Paracelsus, Plautus, Seneca, and the long 
line of authors down to Boccaccio, Rabelais, Saxo- 
Grammaticus, and the rest! The critic did not find 
in Bunyan's pages the careful diction of a scholar, the 
sonorous speech of the ancients, or the elegant and 
punctilious Norman of the court. " The Bunyan vo- 
cabulary," says Macaulay, "is the vocabulary of the 
common people. There is not an expression, if we 
except a few technical theological terms, which would 
puzzle the rudest peasant." In short, we need not 
pause, marvelous as are the pages of the " Pilgrim's 
Progress," to ask of John Bunyan, as indeed we must 
ask of William Shakespeare, the question, " how 
knoweth this man letters, having never learned?" 
Peerless as the result all is, there is nothing in the 
writings of John Bunyan which can not be accounted 
for by natural (that is to say, by what we have been 
obliged by the course of human experience to accept 
as not impossible) causes. "The years of Bunyan's 
boyhood were those during which the Puritan spirit 
was in the highest vigor over all England. ... It is 
not wonderful, therefore, that a lad to whom nature 
had given a powerful imagination and sensibility which 
amounted to a disease, should have been early haunted 
by religious terrors. Before he was ten, his sports 



166 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

were interrupted by fits of remorse and despair, and 
his sleep disturbed by dreams of fiends trying to fly 
away with him. . . . He enters the Parliamentary 
army, and, to the last, he loves to draw his illustra- 
tions of sacred things from camps and fortresses, guns, 
trumpets, flags of truce, and regiments arrayed, each 
under its own banner. . . . His ' Greatheart,' his 
' Captain Boanerges,' and his ' Captain Credence ' are 
evidently portraits of which the originals were among 
those martial saints who fought and expounded in 
Fairfax's army. . . . He had been five years a preacher 
when the Kestoration put it in the power of the Cav- 
aliers ... to oppress the Dissenters. . . . He was 
flung into Bedford jail, with pen and paper for com- 
pany," 1 etc., etc. Here are the school and the ex- 
perience, and the result is writings " which show a 
keen mother wit, a great command of the homely 
mother tongue, an intimate knowledge of the English 
bible, and a vast and dearly bought spiritual expe- 
rience." 2 Moreover, here is a scholar like Macaulay 
striving to account for the extraordinary phenomenon 
of a "Pilgrim's Progress" written by a village tinker. 
But in the case of the at least equally extraordinary 
phenomenon of the Shakespearean drama, the creation 
of a village butcher, the scholar has not yet been born 
to the Shakespeareans who deems it necessary or profit- 
able to try his hand at any such investigation. " Where 
did he get his material? " " Oh, he picked it up around 
Stratford, somehow ! " " But his learning ?" " Oh, he 
found it lying around the theater somewhere ! " Prob- 

14, Bunyan," in " Encyclopaedia Britannica," by Macaulay. 
2 Ibid. 



PART III. — THE JONSONIAN TESTIMONY. 167 

ably there were encyclopedias to be fished out of the 
mud of the bank-side in those days, of which we can 
find no mention in the chroniclers ! And so, although 
scarcely a commentator on the glowing text has not 
paused in wonder at the vastness and magnificence of 
this material, leading him on to vaster and more mag- 
nificent treasuries at every step, so far as we are able 
to discover, not one of them has attempted to trace 
the intellectual experience of the man who wrought 
it all out of the book and volume of his unaided brain. 
Not one of them has paused to ask the Scriptural ques- 
tion, "How knoweth this man letters, having never 
learned ? " For, it can not be too incessantly reiterated, 
the question is not, " Was Shakespeare a poet?" but, 
"Had he access to the material from which the plays 
are composed ? " Admit him to have been the greatest 
poet, the most frenzied genius in the world; where 
did he get — not the poetry, but — the classical, philo- 
sophical, chemical, historical, astronomical, geological, 
etc., etc., information — the facts that crowd these 
pages ? 

And let us not be credited, in these pages, with a 
malignant rejection of every tradition or anecdote that 
works to William Shakespeare's renown, and a cor- 
responding retention of every tradition or anecdote to 
his disparagement. For example, if it is asked, Why 
reject the story of King James's autograph letter, and 
retain the story of the trespass on Sir Thomas Lucy's 
deer? the answer must be : first; because, while there 
is nothing improbable in the latter, there is much of 
improbability in the former. King James was a king, 
and kings rarely write autograph letters to subjects. 
The Lord Chamberlain may give a sort of permission 



168 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

to a haberdasher to call himself haberdasher to Queen 
Victoria ; but it would be vastly improbable that Queen 
Victoria should write an autograph letter to the hab- 
erdasher to that effect. Second, because the poaching 
story (to use a legal test) appears to be so old that the 
memory of man runneth not to a time when it was 
not believed ; whereas the King James story first ap- 
peared in the year 1710, in a biographical notice af- 
fixed to an edition of the plays prepared by one Ber- 
nard Lintot. Mr. Lintot gave no authority for the 
statement whatever, except to say that it rested on the 
word of " a credible person then living." But every- 
body can appreciate the zeal and appetite with which 
rival biographers, like rival newspaper reporters, strug- 
gle to get hold of a new fact for their columns, and 
nobody will wonder that, after Mr. Lintot, no " biog- 
rapher" omitted to mention it. As a matter of fact, 
the letter from King James and the letter from Queen 
Elizabeth, produced by young Ireland, are equally 
genuine correspondence. But the stories of the latter 
class, while not beyond question, are at least not im- 
probable, considering the record of the youth Shakes- 
peare at Stratford, while those of the first are cer- 
tainly improbable on their face, and can be in almost 
every case traced to their exact source. 

So the story of his holding horses, while by no means 
authentic, (Mr White says it was not heard of until 
the middle of the last century), is by no means im- 
probable, seeing that the lad ran away to London — 
— and Eowe and the old sexton both agree that he be- 
gan — as self-made men do — at the bottom. The story 
of Queen Elizabeth's crossing the stage and dropping 
her glove, which Shakespeare picked up and pre- 



PART III. — THE JONSONIAN TESTIMONY, 169 

sented with an impromptu, Mr. White himself smiles 
at, with the remark that " the anecdote is plainly one 
made to meet the craving for personal details of Shakes- 
peare's life," 1 and he treats it as he does the " Florio" 
in the British Museum, supposed to have "belonged to 
William Shakespeare, because that name is written — 
— after his mode — on a fly-leaf ; with a pleasant wish 
that he were able to believe in it. 1 

Far from being of the class that kings delight to 
honor, it is simply impossible to turn one's researches 
into any channel that leads into the vicinity of Strat- 
ford without noticing the fact that the Shakespeare 
family left, in the neighborhoods where it flourished, 
one unmistakable trace familiar in all cases of vulgar 
and illiterate families ; namely, the fact that they 
never knew or cared, or made an effort to know, of 
what vowels or consonants their own name was com- 
posed, or even to preserve the skeleton of its pronun- 
ciation. They answered — or made their marks — in- 
differently to "Saxpir" or "Chaksper;" or to any 
other of the thirty forms given by Mr. Grant White, 2 
or the fifty-five forms which another gentleman of 
elegant leisure has been able to collect. 3 

In the records of the town council of Stratford, of 
which John Shakespeare was no unimportant part, the 
name is written in fourteen different forms, which may 
be tabulated as follows : , 

1 Shakespeare's Works. Boston, 1865. Vol.1., p. 80, in, and 
see a note to the same volume, pp. 96-7, as to Ratzei's ghost, sur- 
mised to be an allusion to Shakespeare. 

1 lb., p. 128. 

2 Shakespeare's Scholar, pp. 478-480. 

8 George Russel French, Shakespeareana Geologicana, p. 348. 



170 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

4 times written Shackesper. 17 times written Shakspeyr. 

3 times written Shackespere. 4 times written Shakysper. 

4 times written Shacksper. 9 times written Shakyspere. 
2 times written Shackspere. 69 times written Shaxpeare. 

13 times written Shakespere. 8 times written Shaxper. 

1 time written Shaksper. 18 times written Shaxpere. 

5 times written Shakspere. 9 times written Shaxspeare. 

In the marriage bond of November 28, 1582, it is 
twice written, each time Shagspere. On the grave of 
Susanna, it is Shakespere ; and. on the other graves of 
the family, Shakespeare, except that under the bust it 
is Shakspeare. That is to say, just as many orthogra- 
phies as there are tombstones and inscriptions. Any 
lawyer's clerk who bas had occasion to searcb for evi- 
dence among the uneducated classes, knows how cer- 
tainly a lower or bigher grade of intelligence will 
manifest itself primarily in an ignorance of or indif- 
ference to one's own name or a corresponding zeal for 
one's own identity, and anxiety that it shall be accu- 
rately "taken down." Whether this infallible rule 
obtained in the days of the Shakespeares or not, or 
whether a family, that was so utterly stolid as not to 
know if their patronymic was spelled with a " c," a 
"k," or an " x," could have appreciated and bestowed 
upon their child a classical education (not to ring the 
changes upon politics, philosophy, etc., right here), 
is for the reader to judge for bimself. 

Mr. W. H. Smith maintains that Shakespeare, like 
the rest of his family, was unable to write, and had 
learned, by practice only, to make the signature which 
he was assured was his name. Mr. Smith founds his 
theory on the fact that, in the "Will the word "seale" 
(in the formula, " witness my seale," etc.) is erased, 



PART III. — THE JONSONIAN TESTIMONY. 171 

and the word "hand" substituted. In a letter to Mr. 
Spedding, 1 Mr. Smith claims that this erasure and sub- 
stitution prove that the draughtsman who prepared 
the Shakespeare "Will, knowing that the testator could 
not write, did not suppose that he would sign his 
name, and so prepared it for the superimposition of 
his seal. " I know/' says Mr. Smith, " that you will 
ingeniously observe that that might have been his be- 
lief, but that the fact could better have been proved if 
i h.and' had been erased and ' seale' inserted. But 
Shakespeare, being proud of his writing, and, as. this 
would probably be his last opportunity, insisted on 
exhibiting his 'hand.'" According to Mr. Smith, 
therefore, Ben Jonson's speech about " never blotting 
out a line," was redundant. But, whether able to 
write, or, like his ancestors and descendants, signing 
with a mark, he clearly cared no more than they 
how people spelled his name. A Mr. George Wise, 
of Philadelphia, has been able to compile a chart ex- 
hibiting one thousand nine hundred and six ways of 
spelling the Stratford boy's name; 2 A commentary 
on the efforts of Mr. Halliwell and others, to estab- 
lish the canonical orthography, which might well re- 
duce them to despair. The fact is, that there can no 
more be a canonical spelling of the name Shakespeare 
than there can be a canonical face of the boy William. 
The orthography of Shakespeare, as now accepted, 
and the face now accepted as belonging to William 
of that name, are both modern inventions. Even the 

1 See third edition Holmes' " Authorship of Shakespeare," 
p. 627. 

Philadelphia, 1858. See Essays on Shakespeare, Carl Elze; 
translated by Schmitz (London, Macmillan's 1874), note to p. 371. 



172 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MFTH. 

" best of that family" (according to the old clerk), 
William, when called to sign his own last will and 
testament (obliged by law to sign each of the three 
sheets upon which it was engrossed) three times, 
spelled his name a different way each time. His 
daughter Judith lived and died without being able to 
spell or write it at all; Milton, Spenser, Sidney, even 
Gower and Chaucer (whom even our own Artemus 
Ward pronounced " no speller"), had bat one way of 
writing their own names — and never dreamed of 
one thousand nine hundred and six. The name is now 
supposed to have been simply " Jacques-Pierre" (James 
Peter), which had been mispronounced — as English- 
men mispronounce French — for unnumbered genera- 
tions. 1 This is the present mispronunciation of Jac- 
ques prevalent in Warwickshire. And, such being 
the true origin of the name, it is, of course, natural to 
find it as we do, written in two words " Shake-speare," 
in those days. It is not William Shakespeare's fault 
that he sprang from an illiterate family, but that — after 
growing so rich as to be able to enjoy an income ot 
$25,000 a year, he should never send his children — es- 
pecially his daughter Judith — to school, so that the poor 
girl, on being married, on the 11th clay of February, 
1616, should be obliged to sign her marriage bond with 
a mark, shows, we think, that he was not that immortal 
he would have been had he written the topmost literature 

1 " ' Thomas Jakes, of Wonersh ' was one of the list of gentry 
of the shire 12 Henry IV., 1433. At the surrender of the Abbey 
of Kenilworth 26 Henry VIII., 1535, the abbot was Simon Jakes, 
who had the pension of £100 granted him." (Wilkes' " Shakes- 
peare from an American Point of View." New York : D. Apple- 
ton &Co., 1877, p. 464.) 



PART III. — THE JONSONIAN TESTIMONY. 173 

of the world — the Shakespearean Drama ! But, still, 
this most unsatisfactory person — this man who an- 
swers, like Mr. Carroll's skipper, to " hi, or to any 
loud cry " — 

" To what-you-may-call-um or what-is-his-name 
But especially thing-um-a-jig," 

or to whatever the nearest actor or scene-shifter may 
happen to hit on when he wants the poor little "su- 
pernumerary," and " Joannes Factotum" — actually 
lived to clamber astride of the most immortal birth- 
right of his own or of any century, and has clung 
thereon like another old man of the sea on Sinbad's 
shoulders, and been carried down through these three 
hundred years, and is being carried yet, down or up, 
to an undeterminate immortality of fame that is the 
true estate of somebody else ! For, not only has the 
world not yet gotten its eyes half open, but it contu- 
maciously refuses to open them to the facts in the 
case, and prefers to hug as tightly as it ever did this 
stupendous hoax — ("Shakespearean" indeed, in that 
it has outlasted and outlived all the other hoaxes put 
together — the witchcraft hoax, the Chatterton hoax, 
the Ossian hoax, the moon hoax, and all the rest of 
them) ; that has carried all sorts of parasite hoaxes, 
like Ireland's, Collier's, and Cunningham's upon its 
back, until their little day has been accomplished, and 
they have dropped off, just as, one of these days, the 
present hoax must drop off, and breathe its last, with- 
out a single mourner to stand by the coffin, and con- 
fess himself it's disciple. 



L74 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 



TATIT IV. 

EXTRA SHAKESPEAREAN THEORIES: THE DELIA 
BACON THEORY. 




HERE is a legal maxim to the effect that he 
who destroys should be able to build up. 
The anti-Shakespeareans have not neglected 
to observe it. The days when William 
Shakespeare first appeared in London, happened to be 
the days when the Renaissance had reached England, 
and the drama which began then for the first time to 
be produced, was the English Renaissant Drama — just 
throwing off the crudities of the old miracle and 
mystery plays borrowed from the continent, and begin- 
ning to be English and original. Moreover, letters 
and learning, so long exclusively confined to the rich 
and gentle, began to find expressions in other ranks. 
"The mob of gentlemen who write with ease" w T ere, 
one and all, beginning to use their pens. There were 
no village newspapers with their " Poet's Corners," 
and these writers sent their manuscripts through the 
only channel at hand — the green-room door. 

As these scores of manuscripts came in, William 
Shakespeare, of Stratford, now Mr. Manager Shakes- 
peare of the Blackfriars, read them over; took out a 
scene here and an act there ; scissored them as he 
pleased; made this "heavy" for the low comedian, 
and that for the "first old man ;" adjusted the "love 
business," made "practical" for his boards all the 



PART IV. — EXTRA SHAKESPEAREAN THEORIES. 175 

nature and humor, and cut out all that came flat, stale, 
and unprofitable from the amateur's hand ; even took 
a little of each to make a new one, if necessary, (thus 
retaining the indicia that this was written by a law- 
yer, that by a physician, this by a soldier, that by a 
chemist, etc., etc.). He did what Dumas, Boucicault 
and Daly do to-day; he was, in other words, the 
stage editor, not the author, of the Shakespearean 
drama; though, that it should be called by his name, 
is, perhaps, the least unusual thing about it. 

Besides the gentlemen who used their pens, the very 
recent dissolution of the monasteries had thrown mul- 
titudes of "learned clerks," (the "clerical" profession 
then including lawyers and physicians, and indeed all 
book-learned men) upon their own resources for daily 
bread, and there was only one depot for their work. Not 
three, but three thousand men there were, other things 
being equal, more competent by education at least, 
than William Shakespeare to write the Shakespearean 
drama. But other things, as we shall see, were not 
equal. It is suggested, on the one hand, that William 
Shakespeare wrote the plays ; on the other hand, that 
Francis Bacon wrote them ; and, again, that Sir Walter 
Raleigh wrote them. So far as mere dates go, any one 
of the three might have written them. They were 
all three in London, and on the ground when the 
plays appeared. The truth is perhaps somewhere 
among the three. Francis Bacon was the most learned 
man of his time. He could and did read Greek in the 
original, and he did have access to untranslated manu- 
scripts, such as the " Menaechmi" of Plautus. He was 
a philosopher, and he did come nearer to a prescience 
of the philosophy of ages to be, than any man who 



176 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

ever lived — as witness his own acknowledged works. 
Sir Walter Raleigh was a wit and a poet, a'gentleman, 
a man of elegant nonchalance, a very Mercotio, to the 
day of his execution. He was liberally educated, cul- 
tured, and would have been all this in a more culti- 
vated day than his own; moreover, he was idle and a 
scribbler of belles-lettres. Perhaps he killed time by 
writing speeches for the obsequious manager to put 
into plays for his stage. Anonymous or pseudonymic 
authorship has ever been a penchant of the gentle and 
idle. Shakespeare, let us say, was a shrewd man of 
business, who kept up with his times, as do managers 
of theaters to-day ; he was quick to perceive where a 
point might be made in his plays, and moreover he 
employed — or perhaps was fortunate enough to secure 
by way of friendship — a poet to turn his ideas into 
speech for the mouths of his players. That he used 
his pen to prepare the prompter's manuscript of the 
pieces performed at his theater, we have already seen 
there is reason to believe. That he ever composed, on 
his own account, we have only a sort of innuendo of 
certain of his brother actors and playwrights, and a 
Stratford tradition, which we can trace to no other 
source than the source of the belief outside — that is to 
say, to the fact that the plays were produced under his 
management in London. The innuendo dubs him a 
poet ; the Stratford tradition makes him to have writ- 
ten doggerel verses. But some have ventured to dis- 
believe both the innuendo and the tradition. 

Still, writing his life, as we do, from imagination, it 
is much easier to imagine the three men — Bacon, Ral- 
eigh, and Shakespeare — producing between them 
"Hamlet," "Othello," or the "Comedy of Errors," 



PART IV. — EXTRA SHAKESPEAREAN THEORIES. 177 

than to imagine "William Shakespeare alone doing it. 
Especially since, apart from the internal evidence of 
the plays, he "had his hands full" of work besides — 
the work in which he earned his competency. It can 
not be too clearly borne in mind that Shakespeare, in a 
space of ten or twelve years, actually made wdiat is a 
fair fortune to-day. That Bacon and Ealeigh, whose 
ambitions did not lead them to seek renown as play- 
wrights, should have contributed their share to the 
plays — the first for gold wmich he needed, and the sec- 
ond for pastime which he craved — is not remarkable; 
we can see hundreds of young lawyers scribbling for 
gold while waiting for practice, or young " swells " try- 
ing their hand at comedies for the sport of the thing, 
by opening our eyes to-day. That the shrewd and 
successful manager should carefully pick into present- 
able and playable shape for his stage, these produc- 
tions of his young friends, is, likewise, the easiest 
thing in the world to conceive of, or to see managers 
doing to-day. Possibly, William Shakespeare, or some 
other skilled playwright, took the dialogues — let us 
say, for example — of Bacon and Raleigh, put them 
into the form of plays, introduced a clown here or a 
jade there, interpolated saws and localisms, gave the 
characters their names, looked out for the " business," 
arranged the tableaux — in short, did what Mr. Wal- 
lack, or Mr. Daly, or Mr. Boucicault would have to 
do to-day to fit a play for the stage. It is thought that 
Shakespeare himself did it, because the plays are said 
to have been seen in his handwriting, and because, 
from that fact or otherwise, they went by his name in 
the days when they were first produced in London. 
This sort of joint authorship would not only explain 



178 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

away the antagonism which grew up between the evi- 
dence of the man Shakespeare and the evidence of the 
Shakespearean plays, but account for the difficulties of 
accepting any anti-Shakespearean theory. This would 
explain the parallel passages in Bacon's writings and in 
the plays, which Judge Holmes has so painstakingly 
sorted out; the little inaccuracies of law and of gram- 
mar, of geography and of history, in the plays them- 
selves ; Mr. Greene's " sea-coast of Bohemia," or the in- 
troduction of gunpowder at the seige of Troy — absurd- 
ities which it is morally impossible to suppose of the 
portrayer of antiquity who wrote "Julius Csesar," or the 
knowledge that framed the historical plays. If, how- 
ever, we consider them as the interpolations of a stage- 
wright 1 aiming at stage effect, they are easily enough 
accounted for. The stage wright saw an opportunity 
for the introduction of a stage ship or shipwreck, hence 

1 It is nothing less than marvelous that this simple explanation 
should not have occurred to the wise men who have been, knock- 
ing their heads against "the sea-coast of Bohemia" for the last 
hundred years. That this error is a part of the "business" and 
not of the play, is very evident from a casual reading of Act III., 
Scene III. The stage direction for that scene is simply, " Scene — 
a desert country near the sea," to be sure there is no stage direction 
of any sort in the "first folio" but we may be sure that this was 
the proper stage setting of the piece. And to fit it, Antigonus, 
the first speaker, says to the mariner: "Art thou perfect, then 
our ship hath touched the deserts of Bohemia?" Robert Green 
makes the same mistake in his " Dorastus and Faunia." It was, 
if any thing, a vulgar error of the time. There is no further al- 
lusion to the troublesome geography in the play. So, too, the 
gunpowder used at the seige of Troy is a part of the " business," 
and should be assigned where it belongs — to the playwright and 
not to the dramatist. Not only did the stage editor put it in, 
but he took it out of Green's "Dorastus and Faunia." 



PART IV. — EXTRA SHAKESPEAREAN THEORIES. 179 

he puts in the borrowed " sea-coast." He needs an 
alarum of guns to impress his audience on the coming 
evening with the fact that a fight is in progress. And 
even if it should occur to him to doubt if there were 
any guns at the siege of Ilium, he is pretty certain that 
it will not occur to the groundlings or the penny seats, 
from whose pocket all is grist that comes to his mill, 
if he makes the guns and the cannon a part of the 
"business." So, again, we have only to understand 
this, and the characters of Nym and Bardolph — sup- 
posed to have puzzled the critics since critics first be- 
gan to busy themselves with, these dramas — is ex- 
plained. Barclolph is only the low comedian, inserted 
by the experienced manager to tickle the fricti ciceris 
et nucis emptor, with his fiery nose, and corporal Kym 
to break in with his "There's the humor of it," just 
as Rip Van Winkle dwells upon his favorite toast, and 
S >lon Shingle upon his ancestor who "fitted into the 
Revolution." And to many minds this accounts for 
the little dashes of obscene display, the lewd innuendo, 
which came never from the same pen as the master- 
strokes, but which they prefer to conceive of an actor 
or manager interpolating to the delight of Monsieur 
Taine's audience, and for the stolen delectation of the 
maids of honor and city dames who went, in men's 
clothes, to mingle with them. 

This, too, might account for the poems dedicated 
to Southampton. In the lax court and reign of the 
Virgin Queen, there was at least one man bold and 
reckless enough to stand patron to the " Venus and 
Adonis" and "The Rape of Lucrece " — the noble 
young libertine of nineteen, Southampton. Similarly, 
there may have been but one man available upon 



180 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

whom to father them, and so the joint or several pro- 
ductions of certain young men about town, "curled 
darlings " who affected Shakespeare's green-room, 
were sworn upon the complacent manager, who doubt- 
less saw his profit in it. We have rumor, indeed, that 
his profit was no less a sum than one thousand pounds. 
But, as we have seen, and shall see further, this thous- 
and pounds story is not only without authority, but 
incredible: that Southampton's means did not jus- 
tify him in giving away any such sum — that Shakes- 
peare did not need it, and that none of Southampton's 
coterie ever heard of it. 

Whether Bacon wrote these works or not (and we 
may say the same of Ealeigh), and whether the au- 
diences before whom these Shakespearean dramas 
were first presented could have estimated them as 
what we of this age recognize them to be or not; 
we may be sure that, had he chanced to light upon 
them, Lord Bacon could have appraised them, and 
the genius that created them, at their true worth. 
But while Lord Bacon's writings teem with men- 
tion of his own contemporaries (Mr. W. H. Smith 
points out the fact that we owe about all we know of 
Raleigh's skill in repartee to Bacon's "Apothegms"), 
he nowhere alludes to such a man as William Shakes- 
peare! — to William Shakespeare — who, if popular be- 
lief is true, was his lordship's most immortal contem- 
porary, the one mind mightier than Bacon's, and yet 
not a rival or a superior in his own particular sphere, 
of whom he could have been jealous. The truth 
which makes this strange riddle plain is, according to 
the Baconian theory, that (to use Sir Tobie Matthew's 
words in his famous letter to his patron) " the most 



PART IV. — EXTRA SHAKESPEAREAN THEORIES. 181 

prodigious wit that ever I knew, of my nation, and 
of this side of the sea, is of your lordship's name, 
though he be known by another," 1 in other words, that 
Bacon was " Shakespeare." And, indeed, Sir Tobie 
was fonder of nothing than of indulging in sly allu- 
sions to Lord Bacon's secret, of which he had become 
possessed. In another letter than that just quoted, he 
says again to his lordship: "I will not promise to re- 
turn you weight for weight, but measure for measure . 
. . .and there is a certain judge in the world, who, in 
the midst of his popularity toward the meaner sort of 
men, would fain deprive the better sort of that happi- 
ness which was generally done in that time." 2 

Such considerations as these, as they came one by 
one to light, began to suggest to thinking minds that 
perhaps William Shakespeare was enjoying, by default, 
estates belonging to somebody else. But it is curious 
to see how gradually. In 1733, Theobald, a compe- 
tent and painstaking scholar of the text, declares that 
there were " portions of the plays which proved be- 
yond a doubt that more than one hand had produced 
them." More than fifty years after came Dr. Richard 
Farmer (who wrote his famous letter on "The Learn- 
ing of Shakespeare," in or about 1789), and appears to 
have been the first actual anti- Shakespearean and un- 
believer. Dr. Farmer sought — by demonstrating that 
much of the learning of the plays could have been, 
by sufficient research, procured at second-hand — to ac- 
count for (what he could not overlook) the utter in- 
adequacy of the historical man to the immortal work 

1 Holmes's "Authorship of Shakespeare," second edition, p. 175. 
2 " Bacon and Shakespeare," by W. H. Smith, p. 96. 



182 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

assigned him; just as if it were not, if any thing, an 
increase (or say a substitution) of marvels to suppose 
a busy actor and manager rummaging England for 
forgotten manuscripts in the days when no public li- 
braries existed, and when students lived in cloisters ; 
or (let us say) that he knew precisely where to lay his 
hand on every obscure tract, letter, or memorandum 
ever drawn from a classical source ! And just as if the 
encyclopaedic learning required was lessened by the 
fact that the plot of the perfected play was borrowed 
or rewritten from an older drama of the same name ! 
For example of Farmer's argument, take the fol- 
lowing. In the play of that name, Timon says : 

"The sun's a thief, and with his great attention 
Robs the vast sea. The moon's an arrant thief, 
And her pale fire she snatches from the sun. 
The sea's a thief whose liquid surge resolves 
The moon into salt tears. The earth's a thief 
That feeds and breeds by a composture stolen 
From general excrement : each thing's a thief." 

Now, exclaim the men who uphold the stage mana- 
ger's ability to read Greek, the idea of this is from 
Anacreon, and they give the ode in which William 
Shakespeare found it. Not so fast, says Dr. Farmer. 
He might have taken it from the French of Ronsard, 
a French poet: because one Puttenham, in his "Arte 
of English Poesie," published in 1589, speaks of some 
one — of a " reasonable good facilitie in translation, who, 
finding certain of Anacreon's odes very well translated 
by Ronsard, the French poet — comes a minion and 
translates the same out of French into English," and 
" on looking into Ronsard I find this very ode of Anac- 
reon among the rest ! " 



PART IV. — EXTRA SHAKESPEAREAN THEORIES. 183 

Letting pass the far-fetched conjecture which aims 
to prove that William Shakespeare could not read 
Greek by showing that lie could reach French — or the 
observation, that the sum of Dr. Farmer's arguments 
(for the above is a sample of each and all of them) 
amounts simply to this, that: though the manager knew 
no Greek — he knew where every thing contained in 
Greek was to be obtained in translation: the question 
for us is simply, Why should the stage-manager have 
recourse to either Anacreon or Eonsard for a meteor- 
ological episode? This, and a thousand like passages, 
are nothing but digressions, with nothing whatever to 
do with the action or by-play of the comedy or trag- 
edy in which they occur, and not apposite to any thing 
else in the part of the speakers who pronounced them. 
A scholar might be unable to keep them out ; but why 
should a stage- manager — fitting a spectacle to the 
actinsr necessities of his boards or to the humor of his 
audience — put them in ? Whereas, if a scholar did write 
the manuscript play and sell it to a stage-manager, it 
is useless to ask why the stage-manager did not cut 
out the digression or why he left it in, for that w T as a 
mere matter of whim or circumstance, not worth our 
while to speculate over. Dr. Farmer w^ent just far 
enough to see that, if the William Shakespeare of his- 
tory wrote the Book, something must be clone to ac- 
count for his access to the material he wrought with. 
If the Doctor had kept on a little further, the truth 
would have dawned upon him. But, as it w T as, he (with- 
out looking for them) observed traces of what he be- 
lieved to be two hands in the Plays, and so followed 
Theobald. He says of Hamlet, that he considered it 
" extremely probable that the French ribaldry in the 



184 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

last scene of Hamlet was the work of another than 
the author of the body of the work " — but the hint 
was altogether lost on him. He looked no further, and 
so lived and died unsuspicious of the truth — namely, 
that it was only the fair-copied manuscript that was 
William Shakespeare's. The " without blotting a line " 
of Ben Jonson — not a mere form of speech, but a 
fact, confirmed by Heminges and Condell, the editors 
of the "first folio" of 1623, who say in their preface, 
" we have scarce received from him a blot in his pa- 
pers" — as we shall see further on, ought to have itself 
awakened suspicion. Lope de Vega, the Spaniard, 
who supplied his native stage with upward of two 
thousand original dramas — who is computed to have 
written upward of 21,300,000 verses, and who wrote 
so hurriedly that he never had time to unravel his in- 
trigues, but cut them all open " with a knife " in the 
last act — probably did write u without blotting a line." 
At least so Mr. Hallam thinks, adding that, " nature 
would have overstepped her bounds, and have pro- 
duced the miraculous, had Lope de Vega, along with 
this rapidity and invention, attained perfection in any 
department of literature." * But in the case of these 
marvelous Shakespeare plays, it was preferred to be- 
lieve that nature had " produced the marvelous," 
rather than accept the simple truth that what Hem- 
inges and Condell and Ben Jonson saw, were the en- 
grossed parts written out for each actor, and not the 
first drafts of the poet, improvising as he wrote. 

Except that Mr. Spedding,in the " Gentleman's Mag- 
azine " for February , 1852, printed a paper " Who wrote 

literature of Europe, part ii., ch. vi., § 8. 



PART IV. — EXTRA SHAKESPEAREAN THEORIES. 185 

Shakespeare's Henry VIII?" — in which he claimed to 
have found startling traces of two hands in that play, 
(and possibly some other floating papers which have 
escaped our search) — prior to the year 1852 it had 
occurred to nobody (except Kitty, in w High Life Be- 
low Stairs ") to ask the question, " Who Wrote Shakes- 
peare?" But, in August of that year an anonymous 
writer, in Chambers' " Edinburgh Journal," distinctly 
and for the first time discussed the question, " Who 
wrote Shakespeare? " — when, after going over much of 
the ground we have already traversed, arrived, to his 
own " extreme dissatisfaction," (as he says, at the con- 
clusion), that William Shakespeare " kept a poet." It 
is curious to find this anonymous writer dealing, as airily 
as Lady Bab herself, with the question : and (while un- 
conscious of the elaborate network of evidence he 
might have summoned, and suggesting no prohable 
author by name) actually foreshadowing the laborious 
conviction which, four years later, Delia Bacon was to 
announce. He surmises, indeed, that William Shakes- 
peare was a sort of showman, whose interest in the 
immortal plays was a purchased interest — precisely 
what the law at present understands by " proprietary 
copyright." "The plays apparently arise . . . 
as the series goes on ; all at once Shakespeare, with a 
fortune, leaves London, and the supply ceases. Is 
this compatible with a genius thus culminating, on any 
other supposition than the death of the poet and the 
survival of the employer?" Of this supposititious 
hack-author, who dies, and leaves to William Shakes- 
peare the halo of his genius as well as the profit 
of his toil, this anonymous writer draws a picture 
16 



186 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

that lias something familiar in its coloring. "May 
not William Shakespeare," he asks, " the cautious, 
calculating man, careless of fame, and intent only 
on money-making, have found, in some farthest garret 
over-looking the ' silent highway of the Thames,' 
some pale, wasted student . . . who, with eyes 
of genius gleaming through despair, was about, like 
Chatterton, to spend his last copper coin upon some 
cheap and speedy means of death? What was to 
hinder William Shakespeare from reading, appreciat- 
ing, and purchasing these dramas, and thereafter 
* keeping his poet,' like Mrs. Packwood? . . . 
With this view the disputed passages — those in which 
critics have agreed that the genius is found wanting — 
the meretricious ornaments sometimes crowded in — 
the occasional bad taste — in short, all the imperfec- 
tions discernible and disputable in these mighty dramas, 
are reconcilable with their being the interpolations of 
Shakespeare himself on his poet's works." 1 Miss Delia 
Bacon, a remarkable lacly, followed in a paper printed 
in "Putnam's Magazine," in its issue of January, 
1856, (and therefore must have written it in 1855), and 
was supposed therein to distinctly announce and main- 
tain that Lord Bacon — her namesake by coincidence — 
was the " Shakespeare " wanted — a supposition which, 
as we shall see, was erroneous. 

The audacity of the assertion, by a young woman, a 
school-teacher, in no way distinguished or anywise emi- 
nent, that the idol of these centuries, and of the English- 
speaking race, was a mere effigy of straw — a mere dummy 
for an unknown immortal, was too tremendous ! Men 

Chambers' "Edinburgh Journal," August 7, 1852, p. 88. 



PART IV. — EXTRA SHAKESPEAREAN THEORIES. 187 

stood aghast. Was it a chimera of a mind diseased ! 
Sneered at in her own country, she went to England, 
but found that — while at home she was treading only on 
adverse sentiment — there she was openly tampering with 
vested rights, almost with the unwritten constitution 
of England. She made a few personal friends, and 
found some sympathizers, but all England was arrayed 
against her. She came back, heart-broken, and died 
eight months later. Mr. William Henry Smith, of 
London, in September, 1856, appeared with his " Was 
Lord Bacon the Author of Shakespeare's Plays ? A 
Letter to Lord Ellesmere," in which the Baconian 
theory was very plainly and circumspectly laid down 
and admirably maintained. 1 The presumption once 
disturbed, inquiry began to be diverted from the well- 
worn track of the commentators, and the result has 
been, we think, a candid, rational, and patient attempt 
to study the Shakespearean writings by the aid of con- 
temporary history rather than by mere conjecture, and 
by the record rather than by fancy, guess-work, and 
gossip. It is too early in the day — the time has been 
too short — for the reaction to have proved equal to the 
action, and verified the physical rule ; but three well- 

1 This " Letter," which was reprinted in " Littell's Living Age," 
(No. 56), for November, 1856, was, the following year (1857) elab- 
orated into the valuable work on which we have so unsparingly- 
drawn in these pages, and to which we acknowledge our exceed- 
ing obligation ("Bacon and Shakespeare: An Inquiry touch- 
ing Players, Playhouses, and Play writers in the days of Elizabeth. 
By William Henry Smith. London : Smith, Elder & Co., 1857 "). 
In this work Mr. Smith (in his preface) asserts that at the date 
of his letter to Lord Ellesmere, he had never seen Miss Bacon's 
article in " Putnam's," but, it is to be observed, no where claims 
to have been the originator of the " Baconian Theory." 



188 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

defined anti-Stratfordian theories have offered them- 
selves already, as substitutes for the mossy and vener- 
able fossil remains of the commentators. These theo- 
ries are : 

1. The Delia Bacon Theory; 

2. The Baconian Theory ; and 

3. The New Theory (as we are compelled, for want 
of a better name, to call it). 

THE DELIA BACON THEORY. 

It was across no dethroned and shattered intellect 
that there first flashed the truth it has been the essay 
of these papers to rehearse. That Delia Bacon — who, 
earliest in point of time, announced to the world that 
"Shakespeare" was the name of a book, and not the 
name of its author; and who, contenting herself with 
the bare announcement, soon passed on to the theory 
we are now about to notice — was pelted with a storm 
of derision, abuse, and merciless malice, until in pov- 
erty, sickness, and distress, but still in a grand silence, 
she passed out of sight for ever, is true enough. 
That iu the midst of it all she still struggled on in 
what she believed to be " the world's work " — bearing 
more than it was ever intended a woman should bear 
— is not to over weigh any merit her scheme of the 
Shakespearean pla}^s may have possessed, however it 
may have eventuated in the "madness" so insepar- 
ably connected with her name. Whatever Delia Bacon 
died, she lived and moved in the conviction that she 
was a worker in the world's workshop. What to us 
is a mere cold, historical formulary, seems, however, 
we may smile at the absurdity, to have seized upon 
her whole life and being; and, as in a great crusade 



PART IV. — EXTRA SHAKESPEAREAN THEORIES. 189 

against a universal error, she seems to have struggled 
in loneliness and wretchedness, with a crusader's faith 
and a martyr's reward. 

In all her tragic life, Delia Bacon appears never to 
have paused to formulate the theory, for ever to be 
associated with her name, as to the actual authorship 
of the plays. The paper "William Shakespeare and 
his Plays," which appeared in " Putnam's Magazine" 
(and inaugurated the controversy, never thereafter to 
" down " at anybody's bidding), seems to treat the mat- 
ter as already settled. It is rather sarcasm at the 
expense of those who rejected the theory of a non- 
Shakespearean authorship than a formulation of the 
theory itself. That the sarcasm, as a sustained effort, 
has rarely if ever been equaled, there certainly can be 
no question. Her indignation at the idea that the 
magnificent plays sprang from the brain of " the Strat- 
ford poacher — now that the deer-stealing fire has gone 
out of him; now that this youthful impulse has been 
taught its conventional mental limits, sobered into the 
mild, sagacious, witty Mr. Shakespeare of the Globe," 
is intense. " What is to hinder Mr. Shakespeare, the 
man who keeps the theater on the bank-side, from 
working himself into a frenzy when he likes, and 
scribbling out, unconsciously, Lears, and Macbeths, 
and Hamlets, merely as the necessary dialogues to the 
spectacle he professionally exhibits!" Her allusion to 
Bacon is equally impassioned: "We should have 
found, ere this, one with learning broad enough and 
deep enough and subtle enough and comprehensive 
enough ; one with nobility of aim and philosophic 
and poetic genius enough to be able to claim his 
own, his own immortal progeny, unw T arped, un- 



190 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

blinded, undeprived of one ray or dimple of that all- 
pervading reason that informs them — one who is able to 
reclaim them, even now, ' cured and perfected in their 
limbs, and absolute in full numbers as he conceived 
them !' " Long before its appearance, as we shall pro- 
ceed to narrate; and still longer before the world had 
well opened its eyes to the fact that a formidable 
anti-Shakespearean proposition had been asserted, its 
author had left the proposition itself leagues behind, 
and was well along on her route to the fountain-head 
of its inspiration. The problem she proposed to her- 
self was not, " Did Bacon and others write the plays ?" 
but " Why did Bacon and others write the plays 
under the name of William Shakespeare ?" 

As the fruit of laborious study of the system and 
structure of the plays, she reached the answer — 
as she believed, and lived and died believing — hidden 
and embalmed in the masterpiece of them all, the 
tragedy of " Hamlet." " Hamlet," she maintained, 
was the master-key that unlocked the whole magnifi- 
cent system. They were not plays, but chapters in a 
great Treatise — links in a great chain of philosophy — 
a new philosophy of politics and of life; and, just as 
the Lord Hamlet caused certain strolling players, with 
the set speech he put into their mouths, to " catch the 
conscience of the king," so had the greatest mind of 
all the golden age put into the mouths of the vaga- 
bond Shakespeare and his crew the truth which should, 
in the fullness of time, catch the conscience of the 
whole world. But why should these great minds have 
chosen to put their philosophy into enigmas and 
ciphers? Miss Bacon's answer was convincing : " It 
was the time when the cipher, in which one could 



PART IV. — EXTRA SHAKESPEAREAN THEORIES. 191 

write ' omnia per omnia,' was in request ; when even 
4 wheel ciphers' and 'doubles' were thought not un- 
worthy of philosophic notice. It was a time, too, when 
the phonographic art was cultivated and put to other 
uses than at preseut, and when a nomrne cle plume was 
required for other purposes than to serve as the refuge 
of an author's modesty, or vanity, or caprice. It was 
a time when puns, and charades, and enigmas, and 
anagrams, and monograms, and ciphers, and puzzles 
were not mere sport and child's play; when they had 
need to be close and solvable only to those who should 
solve them. It was a time when all the latent capaci- 
ties of the English language were put in requisition, 
and it was flashing and crackling through all its length 
and breadth, w T ith puns and quips and conceits and 
jokes and satires, and inlined with philosophic se- 
crets that opened clown into the bottom of a tomb, 
that opened into the Tower, that opened on the scaf- 
fold and the block." 1 This was the " Delia Bacon 
theory." This was the " madness " forever associated 
with her plaintive story, and not the proposition that 
the author of the plays (whoever he might be — or they, 
if more than one) and William Shakespeare were per- 
sons — as distinctly two as were the noble Hamlet and 
the poor player who played " Gonzago " in the " Mouse- 
trap " that day before the majesty of Denmark. But, 
madness or not, Miss Bacon never wavered in her con- 
viction that the appointed time to read the oracles had 
come, and that she, Delia Bacon, a namesake, possibly, 
of the real Hamlet of the plays, had been raised in 
her appointed place to be the reader. Alas for her ! 



1 a 



Philosophy of Shakespeare's Plays unfolded," p. x. 



192 THE SHAKSPEAREAN MYTH. 

Like Cassandra, she announced her message only to 
be scorned and flouted in return ! 

By what whim of fortune or fancy the great plays 
had grown to be known as " Shakespeare's works," 
any more than Burbage's works, or Jonson's works, 
she never troubled herself to inquire ; but with* the de- 
tails of her mission she was careful to possess herself. 
She held that "the material evidence of her dogma as 
to the authorship, together with the key of the new 
philosophy, would be found buried in Shakespeare's 
grave." 1 She claims to have discovered, by careful 
study of Lord Bacon's letters, not only the key and 
clew to the whole mystery, but to an entire Baconian 
cipher In these letters — there were over five hun- 
dred of them extant, and others have been discovered, 
we believe, since Miss Bacon's day — however, it still 
remains, for the secret of Miss Bacon's clew died with 
her. But she stoutly maintained that in these letters 
were " definite and minute directions how to find a 
will and other documents relating to the conclave of 
Elizabethan philosophers, which were concealed in a 
hollow space in the under surface of Shakespeare's 
gravestone. . . . The directions, she intimated, 
were completely and precisely to the point, obviating 
all difficulties in the way of coming to the treasure, 
and so contrived as to ward off any troublesome con- 
sequences likely to arise from the interference of the 
parish officers. . . . There was the precious secret 
protected by a curse, as pirates used to bury their gold 
in the guardianship of a fiend." 2 The original manu- 

1 Hawthorne. 

2 Id. Delia Bacon was born in New Haven, in 1811, and early 
devoted herself to literature, writing two works " The Tales of 



PAKT IV. — EXTRA SHAKESPEAREAN THEORIES. 193 

scripts of the plays she did not expect to find there. 
These she believed the ignorant Shakespeare to have 
scattered, after the blotless copies for the players had 
been taken ; to have devoted to domestic purposes, or 
to have never concerned himself about further. This 
was the gravamen of the charge she brought against 
"Lord Leicester's groom," the co-manager, late of 
Stratford, and this the vandalism for which she never 
could forgive him. " This fellow," she cried, " never 
cared a farthing for them, but only for his gains at 
their hands. , . . What is to hinder his boiling his 
kettle with the manuscripts . . . after he had done 
with them ? He had those manuscripts — the original 
Hamlet, with its last finish; . . . the original Lear, 
with his own fine readings ... he had them all — 
pointed, emphasized, corrected, as they came from the 
gods ! And he has left us to wear out our youth and 
squander our life in poring over and setting right the 
old garbled copies of the play-house ! . . . For is he 
not a private, economical, practical man, this Shakes- 
peare of ours, with no stuff and nonsense about him ; 
a plain, true-blooded Englishman, who minds his own 

the Puritans " and " The Bride of Fort Edward." She soon, how- 
ever, abandoned miscellaneous writing and adopted the profes- 
sion of a student and teacher of history, and began her career 
as a lecturer on history in the city of Boston. Her method was 
original with herself. She had models, charts, maps, and pic- 
tures to illustrate her subject; and we are told by Mrs. Farrar 
(" Recollections of Seventy Years," Boston, Ticknor & Fields, 
1866) that, being of a commanding presence and elegant delivery, 
she was successful and attracted large audiences. Mrs. Farrar 
says, " She looked like one of Dante's sibyls, and spoke like an 
angel." 

17 



194 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

business, and leaves others to take care of theirs? . . . 
What did he do with them? He gave them to his 
cook, or Dr. Hall put up potions in them, or Judith — 
poor Judith, who signified her relation to the author 
of Lear and the Tempest, and her right to the glory 
of the name he left her, by the very extraordinary 
kind of ' mark' which she affixed to legal instruments 
— poor Judith may have curled her hair with them to 
the day of her death. . . . What did you do with 
them ? You have skulked this question long enough ; 
you will have to account for them ! The awakening 
ages will put you on the stand, and you will not leave 
it until you answer the question, what did you do with 
them?" 1 This chain of dramas, so blindly perpetu- 
ated by William Shakespeare, became, through Miss 
Bacon's unlocking process, a great system of political 
philosophy, dictated by the thoughtful Bacon and his 
compeers, and locked up for the nineteenth century, 
against the blindness of the centuries between. 

But, of so startling a proposition, Miss Bacon 
confesses that the world would require something 
more than her own conviction. So she deliberately 
set out to "prove, from the very crypt and silence of the 
grave itself, its truth. To St. Albans, whence the 
mysterious letters were dated, to the lonesome tomb 
at old Verulam and the vault in Stratford chancel, she 
proposed a pilgrimage — thence to probe the secret, 
and lay it open to a doubting world. " Her friends 
regarded her theory as a delusion, and Miss Bacon as 
a monomaniac. . . . They put their Shakespeares 
out of sight when she approached, declined to listen 

l " Putnam's Magazine," January, 1856. 



PART IV.— EXTRA SHAKESPEAREAN THEORIES. 195 

to her conversations on the subject, and peremptorily 
refused contributions to assist in her expedition. But, 
by her lectures, and thefriendsshe enlisted in her pro- 
ject in ]STew York City, she gathered together enough 
money to get to London." 1 

It was while in London, in abject poverty and 
friendlessness, that Thomas Carlyle, "upon whom she 
had called and whom she had impressed with respect 
for herself if not for her theory," says Hawthorne, 
advised Miss Bacon to put her thoughts upon paper 
first, before proceeding to the overt act of proof she 
contemplated — namely, the opening of William 
Shakespeare's grave. It was upon his advice that 
this most remarkable woman — sitting in bed in a 
garret to keep warm without a fire, without sufficient 
or wholesome food, "looking back," to use her own 
words, " on the joys and sorrows of a world in which 
I have no longer any place, like a departed spirit," 
and yet, doing " the world's work," and knowing 
" that I had a right to demand aid for it" — undertook 
to unfold out of the Shakespearean plays their hidden 
system of philosophy." Meanwhile, under a contract 
obtained for her by Mr. R. W. Emerson (though, it is 
presumed, more for temporary supply of funds than 
as rider to her great work), she furnished to " Put- 
nam's Magazine" eighty pages of manuscript, which 
became the famous paper " William Shakespeare and 
his Plays," first announcing to the world the first anti- 
Shakespearean theory of which it had ever heard. 2 

1 Mrs. Farrar. 

2 This was contracted to be the first of a series of papers, but 
the arrangement for some reason, probably because Miss Bacon 
found it necessary to devote herself to the work to which she 



196 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

Under such circumstances, and with such surround- 
ings, this heroic woman accomplished the first half of 
the work she had marked out for herself — the reading 
of the sealed book, the unfolding of the philosophy 
of the Shakespearean plays. Her book was written, 
printed, published, and — damned ! 2 It failed so utterly 

was to give her life, fell through, and no successive papers ap- 
peared in the magazine. 

2 "The Philosophy of Shakespeare's Plays unfolded. By Delia 
Bacon." London: Sampson, Low & Co.; and Boston: Ticknor 
& Fields, 1857. The book lies before us, and certainly is the 
most difficult reading we ever attempted. Even so competent 
and partial a critic as Hawthorne says of it: " Without prejudice 
to her literary ability, it must be allowed that Miss Bacon was 
wholly unfit to prepare her own work for publication, because, 
among other reasons, she was too thoroughly in earnest to know 
what to leave out. Every leaf and line was sacred, for all had 
been written under so deep a conviction of truth, as to assume, 
in her eyes, the aspect of inspiration. A practiced book-maker, 
with entire control of her material, would have shaped out a 
duodecimo volume, full of eloquent and ingenious dissertation — 
criticisms which quite take the color and pungency out of other 
people's critical remarks on Shakespeare. . . . There was a 
great amount of rubbish, which any competent editor would 
have shoveled out of the way. But Miss Bacon thrust the whole 
bulk of inspiration and nonsense into the press in a lump, and 
there tumbled out a ponderous octavo volume, which fell with 
a dead thump at the feet of the public, and has never been 
picked up. A few persons turned over one or two of the leaves, 
as it lay there, and essayed to kick the volume deeper into the 
mud. ... I believe that it has been the faith of this re- 
markable book never to have had more than a single reader. I 
myself am acquainted with it only in isolated chapters and scat- 
tered pages and paragraphs. But since my return to America, 
a young man of genius and enthusiasm has assured me that he 
has positively read the book from beginning to end, and is com- 
pletely a convert to its doctrines. It belongs to him, therefore, 



PART IV. — EXTRA SHAKESPEAREAN THEORIES. 197 

and miserably that nobody opened it, though that 
fact deterred nobody, of course, from laughing at it 
and its author to the utmost of their endeavor in ridi- 
cule and abuse. " Our American journalists," says 
Hawthorne, " at once republished some of the most 
brutal vituperations of the English press, thus pelting 
their poor countrywoman with stolen mud, without 
even waiting to know whether the ignominy was de- 
served, and they never have known it to this day, and 
never will." But none the less did Delia Bacon per- 
severe to the end. The philosophy was unfolded. If 
the world declined to receive the truth — " the truth," 
as she claimed, " that is neither yours nor mine, but 
yours and mine " — it was not on her head, at least, that 
the consequences would fall. The second half of her 
work remained. She proceeded to Stratford to crown 
her labors, by opening the vault in the chancel of the 
parish church, and exposing the secret she had already 
guessed, to the doubting Thomasses who clamored for 
the tactual evidence so long entombed there. 

Although on a mission so likely to be regarded as 
predatory — as even corning under police prohibition, 
Miss Bacon seems to have lived in open avowal of her 
purpose, under the very shadows of the church she 
meant to despoil, and to have made nothing but 
friends. The regard was mutual, and, says Hawthorne, 

and not to me, whom, in almost the last letter that I received 
from her, she declared unworthy to meddle with her work — it 
belongs surely to this one individual, who has done her so much 
justice as to know what she wrote, to place Miss Bacon in her due 
position before the public." (" Our Old Home.") The volume 
is obtained to-day, only by chance, in old bookshops and at such 
prices as the bookseller may choose to demand. 



198 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

" slie loved the slumberous town, and awarded the only 
praise that I ever knew her to bestow on Shakespeare, 
the individual man, by acknowledging that his taste 
in selecting a residence was good, and that he knew 
how to choose a suitable retirement for a person of shy 
but genial temperament." She laid her plans before 
the vicar, who, so far as Miss Bacon ever was per- 
mitted to learn, never opposed them. 1 At least he did 
not hand her over to the first Dogberry at hand — a 
most un-English omission on his part. He did, how- 
ever, ask Miss Bacon's leave to consult a friend, " who 
proved to be legal counsel," and who, doubtless, ad- 
vised inaction, for the matter was allowed, so far as 
the lady was concerned, to retain the form of a pend- 
ing negotiation with the parish, never, as a matter of 
fact, broken off on its part. The rest is best told in 
Mr. Hawthorne's dramatic narrative: "The affair 
looked certainly very hopeful. However erroneously, 
Miss Bacon had understood from the vicar that no 
obstacle would be interposed to the investigation, and 
that he himself would sanction it with his presence. 
It was to take place after nightfall ; and, all prelimi- 
nary arrangements being made, the vicar and the 
clerk professed to wait only her word, in order to set 
about lifting the awful stone from its sepulchre. . . 
She examined the surface of the gravestone, and en- 

1 1 cannot help fancying, however, that her familiarity with 
the events of Shakespeare's life, and of his death and burial 
(of which she would speak as if she had been present at the 
the edge of the grave), and all the history, literature, and per- 
sonalties of the Elizabethan age, together with the prevailing 
power of her own belief, had really gone some little way toward 
making a convert of the good clergyman. — Hawthorne. 



PART IV. — EXTRA SHAKESPEAREAN THEORIES. 199 

deavored, without stirring it, to estimate whether it 
were of such thickness as to be capable of containing 
the archives of the Elizabethan Club. She went over 
anew r the proofs, the clews, the enigmas, the pregnant 
sentences, which she had discovered in Bacon's letters 
and elsewhere. . . . She continued to hover around 
the church, and seems to have bad full freedom of 
entrance in the day-time, and special license, on one 
occasion at least, at a late hour at night. She w r ent 
thither with a dark lantern, which could but twinkle 
lik3 a glow-worm through the volume of obscurity 
that filled the great, dusky edifice. Groping her way 
up the aisle, and toward the chancel, she sat down on 
the elevated part of the pavement above Shakespeare's 
grave. She made no attempt to disturb the grave, 
though, I believe, she looked narrowly into the crevices 
between Shakespeare's and the two adjacent stones, 
and in some way satisfied herself that her single 
strength would suffice to lift the former, in case of 
need. She threw the feeble rays of her lantern up to- 
ward the bast, but could not make it visible beneath the 
darkness of the vaulted roof. . . . Several times she 
heard a low movement in the aisle ; a stealthy, dubious 
footfall prowling about in the darkness, now here, 
now there, among the pillars and ancient tombs, as if 
some restless inhabitant of the latter had crept forth 
to peep at the intruder. By and by the clerk made 
his appearance, and confessed that he had been watch- 
ing her ever since she entered the church." This was 
the nearest she came to the overt act, all thought of 
which was finally abandoned ; for, meanwhile, worn 
out with the absorbing mental activity of these last 
years, and her physical privations (she had only ar- 



200 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

rived in Stratford in a condition so feeble and pros- 
trated as to have believed herself beyond any necessity 
of providing any further earthly sustenance; the 
failure of her book and the miscarriage of her plans 
did the rest), she finally consented to be borne back 
to her home to die peacefully at the last, among friends. 
Her life and her " theory" are only to be discussed 
together, and both with tenderness. "Was there ever 
a more wonderful phenomenon?" exclaims Haw- 
thorne — u a system of philosophy, growing up in this 
woman's mind, without her volition, contrary, in fact, to 
the determined resistance of her volition, and substi- 
tuting itself in the place of everything that originally 
grew there ! To have based such a system on fancy, 
and unconsciously elaborated it for herself, was almost 
as wonderful as really to have found it in the plays 
. . . it certainly came from no inconsiderable depth 
somewhere." 

This was, so far as she herself put it on paper, Miss 
Delia Bacon's theory. It is to be carefully noticed, 
however, that it is a theory, not of a unitary but of a m 
joint authorship. There is one passage in the " Put- 
nam's Magazine" article (which at that time was an- 
nounced by the publishers as the first of a series of 
papers, and was so intended by Miss Bacon) which 
points to Bacon as the supposed sole author of the 
plays. But, in the book which followed it, these plays 
are repeatedly assigned to a conclave or junta of Eliza- 
bethan courtiers and scholars, and such was the faith, 
we believe, in which Miss Bacon labored and died. 

The unitary theory, we believe not unfairly, may 
be assigned to Messrs. Smith and Holmes ; the latter 
of whom, in the preface to his work, most distinctly 



PART IV. — EXTRA SHAKESPEAREAN THEORIES. 201 

rejects Miss Bacon's " junta" authorship, and under- 
takes to maintain the proposition that Bacon, and 
Bacon alone, was the author of the whole canon of 
"Shakespeare." According to Judge Holmes, Bacon 
had reasons in plenty for concealing his author- 
ship, and for "loving better to be a poet than to 
be accounted one." Not only his personal safety : — 
Dr. Heywood was already in the tower for having 
incensed the Queen by an unlucky pamphlet dedi- 
cated to Essex; and "not long after this," says 
Holmes, " and while Essex is under arrest, and Bacon 
in sundry interviews w 7 ith the Queen, is still interced- 
ing in his behalf, her Majesty brings up against him 
this affair of Dr. Heywood's book, and also, as it 
would seem, distinctly flings at Bacon himself about 
' a matter which grew from him, but went after about 
in other's names (in fact no other than the play Rich- 
ard II. we have to-day)." — but the development of 
his plans made concealment particularly desirable. 
Political rivals were watching jealously his every ut- 
terance. He is known to be a " concealed poet," so 
he prepares a masque or two for the queen's own eye 
and audience ; but he alone, according to Judge 
Holmes, writes " Shakespeare." " Had the plays (says 
Mr. Eurness) come down to us anonymously — had the 
labor of discovering the author been imposed upon 
future generations, we could have found no one of 
that day but Francis Bacon to whom, to assign the 
crown. In this case it would have been resting now 
upon his head by almost common consent." It is well 
that this essential difference between the "Delia Ba- 
con" and the "Baconian " theories should be empha- 
sized here. 



202 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 




PAET V. 
THE BACONIAN THEORY. 

71HE English Eenaissance Drama seems nat- 
urally to group itself into two grand divi- 
sions : the Elizabethan drama and — Shakes- 
peare. There is nothing in the first which 
surprises : which impresses us as too abrupt a depart- 
ure from the brutish coarseness and grossness of the 
middle age mummeries — "miracle plays" and " myste- 
ries" — or as being too refined or elaborate for the 
groundlings who swaggered and swilled beer, or the 
lords and maids of honor who ogled and flirted in the 
contemporary barns called " play-houses " in the days 
of Elizabeth. But that the proprietor of one of these 
barns should have found it to his profit to have over- 
shot the intelligence of his audience by creating a 
Hamlet, a Lear, Brutus, and Macbeth — the action of 
whose roles are intellectual rather than scenic — for his 
players, or an Ophelia, Isabella, or Catharine for the 
small boys employed to render his female parts, is 
an incongruity — to put it mildly — which arrests our 
credulity at once. 

The utmost that the Shakespeareans propose to do — 
the utmost they attempt — is to make out William 
Shakespeare to have been an Elizabethan Dramatist. 
But the Elizabethan Dramatist was a man who catered 
to the Elizabethan play-goer. Greene, Peele, Lodge, 
Nash, and the rest, were Elizabethan Dramatists. But 



PART V. — THE BACONIAN THEORY. 203 

their names are only a catalogue to-day. If we hap- 
pen to bay a set of their works at a bargain, at some 
old book sale, we may put them on our shelves ; but 
we are not equal to the laborious task of reading 
them. The Shakespearean Drama is a thing apart. 
Its Dramatic form seems only an Incident; perfect as 
that Incident is, there is so much more in it that we 
find appealing to our hearts and intellects to-day, that 
we hesitate to ascribe it even to an Elizabethan Dram- 
atist. The Baconian theory, as elaborated by Holmes, 
we understand to be that this element apart from the 
Dramatic, in these days is the key-note and explana- 
tion of the whole Shakespeare mystery, and leads to 
the discovery that "Shakespeare" was only a con- 
venient name under which the popular ear was sought 
to be arrested by a Philosopher, who wrote in cipher, 
as it were, for a great purpose of his own. 

The philosophical system contemplated by Francis 
Bacon — say the Baconians — was divided into two 
grand Divisions, the Didactic and the Historical. The 
first — its author (despairing of contemporary fame, or 
possibly distrustful of the permanence of the vernac- 
ular) locked up in the universal language of scholars, 
and left it by his testament to "the next ages." The 
other he chose to put into Dramatic form. The spirit, 
motive, theme, and purport of two great phenomena 
of English letters, synchronizing in date (the philosop- 
lcal canon of Bacon and the dramatic canon of 
'Shakespeare,") are identical, and form together es- 
sentially one great body of philosophy and inductive 
science, and, therefore, must have had the one author. 
" It is a thing, indeed, if practiced professionally, of 
low repute; but if it be made a part of discipline, it 



204 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

is of excellent use — I mean stage playing/' he says 
himself. And again : " Dramatic poetry is as history 
made visible." This Historical or preliminary division 
of the Philosophy did not need a dead, but a living lan- 
guage — the language of his race. This he left in En- 
glish: and when, at the end, a broken, weak, despised 
old man — knowing himself only too well to be the 
meanest and weakest of his kind; but yet conscious 
of having, in a large sense, worked for the good of 
his fellow-men — he made no excuse or palliation, but 
only bespoke for himself and his life " men's charitable 
speeches." 

But, if there was but one author for these two con- 
temporary works, why not William Shakespeare as 
well as Francis Bacon? Why not ask the question, 
" Did William Shakespeare write Lord Bacon's 
works ? " * as well as, "Did Lord Bacon write William 
Shakespeare's work?" While not within our scope to 
demonstrate the identical philosophy of the Novum 
Organum and the Shakespearean Drama — (a work to 
which Miss Bacon devoted her life — and whose dem- 
onstration has been followed by Judge Holmes) — it is 
properly within that scope to examine, from the out- 
side, the question whether, as matter of fact, William 
Shakespeare could have written either; or whether, 
from circumstantial evidence merely, Lord Bacon was 
thus, and in pursuance of a great purpose, actually 
the author of the Dramatic canon of " Shakespeare." 

Now, aside from any opinion as to their value, 
beauty, or eloquence, there are two characteristics of 

1 See this question asked and answered affirmatively in " North 
American Review." February, 1881. New York. D. Appleton 
& Co. 



PART V. — THE BACONIAN THEORY. 205 

the Shakespearean works which, under the calmest 
and most sternly judicial treatment to which they 
could possibly be subjected, are so prominent as to be 
beyond gainsay or neglect. These two characteristics 
are — 1. The encyclopaedic universality of their infor- 
mation as to matters of fact; and, 2. The scholarly 
refinement of the style displayed in them. Their claim 
to eloquence and beauty of expression, after all, is a 
question of taste; and we may conceive of whole peo- 
ples — as, for example, the Zulus or the Ash an tees — 
impervious to any admiration for the Shakesperean 
plays on that account. But this familiarity with what, 
at their date, was the Past of history, and — up to that 
date — the closed book of past human discovery and 
research which we call Learning ; is an open and in- 
disputable fact: and the New-Zealander who shall sit 
on a broken arch of London Bridge and muse over the 
ruins of British civilization, if he carry his researches 
back to the Shakespearean literature, will be obliged 
to find that its writer was in perfect possession of the 
scholarship antecedent to his own date, and of the ac- 
cumulated learning of the world down to his own act- 
ual day. Moreover, this scholar would not be com- 
pelled to this decision only by a careful examination of 
the entire Shakespearean opera. He will be forced to 
so conclude on an examination of any one, or, at the 
most, of any given group of single plays. Let him 
open at random, and fall upon, let us say, the "Julius 
Csesar." * Even the artificial Alexander Pope (who, 
so far from being an over-estimator of the Shakes- 

1 See in this connection "The English of Shakespeare illus- 
trated in a Philological commentary on his ' Julius Csesar.' By 
G. L. Craik." London. Chapman & Hall. 1857. 



206 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

pearean works, only, from the heights of his superior 
plane, admits them very grudgingly to a rank beside 
the works of Waller) was obliged to confess as much. 
" This Shakespeare," says Mr. Pope, " must have been 
very knowing in the customs, rites, and manners of 
antiquity. In 'Coriolanus' and 'Julius Csesar,' not 
only the spirit, but the manner of the Romans is ex- 
actly drawn; and still a nicer distinction is shown be- 
tween the manners of the Romans in the time of 
the former and of the latter. No one is more a mas- 
ter of the poetical story, or has more frequent allusions 
to the various parts of it. Mr. Waller (who has been 
celebrated for this last particular) has not shown more 
learning in this way than Shakespeare," 1 But, if the 
New-Zealander be a philologist, he will scarcely need 
perusal of more than a Shakespearean page to arrive 
at this judgment. Wherever else the verdict of schol- 
arship may err, the microscope of the philologist can- 
not err. Like the skill of the chirographical expert, 
it is infallible, because, just as the hand of a w T riter, 
however cramped, affected, or disguised, will uncon- 
sciously make its native character of curve or inclina- 
tion, so the speech of a man will be molded by his 
familiarity, be it greater or less, with the studies, learn- 
ing, tastes, and conceits of his own day, and by the 
models before him. He cannot unconsciously follow 
models that are unknown to him, or speak in a lan- 
guage he has never learned. Young Chatterton de- 
ceived the most profound scholars of his day, and his 
manuscripts stood every test but this ; but under it 
they revealed the fact, so soon to receive the mournful 

1 Smith, p. 86. 



PART V. — THE BACONIAN THEORY, 207 

corroboration of history, that they were only the forg- 
eries of a precocious boy. To just as moral a certainty 
are the handiwork of the Elohist and the Jehovist dis- 
cernible in the Hebrew Scriptures, and just as abso- 
lutely incapable of an alternative explanation are the 
ear-marks of the Shakespearean text. Hallam, whose 
eyes were never opened to the truth, and who lived 
and died innocent of any anti-Shakespearean theory 
(though he sighed for a " Shakespeare of heaven," 
turning in disgust from the " Shakespeare of earth," 
of whom only he could read in history), noticing the 
phases, unintelligible and improper except in the 
sense of their primitive roots, which occur so copiously 
in the plays, proceeds to say : " In the ' Midsummer- 
Night's Dream' these are much less frequent than in 
his later dramas; but here we find several instances. 
Thus, ' Things base and vile, holding no quantity v (for 
value)-, rivers that 'have overborne their continents 9 
(the continenti viva of Horace); 'compact of imagina- 
tion ; ' ' something of great constancy ' (for consistency) ; 
* sweet Pyramus translated there ; ? 'the law of Athens, 
which by no means we may extenuate,' etc, I have con- 
siderable doubts," continues Mr.Hallam, " whether any 
of these expressions would be found in the contempo- 
rary prose of Elizabeth's reign, which was less over- 
run with pedantry than that of her successor. Could 
authority be produced for Latinisms so forced, it is still 
not very likely that one who did not understand the : r 
proper meaning would have introduced them into 
poetry." x When we remember the coarseness of 

lu Literature of Europe," Part II, ch. vi, sec. 81. " To be told 
that he played a trick to a brother player in a licentious amour, or 
that he died in a drunken frolic . . does not exactly inform 



208 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

social speech in those days, even in the highest walks 
of life — we happen to have very graphic accounts of 
Queen Elizabeth's sayings and retorts courteous (as, 
e. g., when she boxed Essex's ears and told him to go 
and he hanged) — it requires considerable credulity to 
assign this classic diction to a rustic apprentice from 
Stratford, who, at " about eighteen," begins his dra- 
matic labors, fresh from the shambles, and with no 
hiatus for a college course between. 

Add to this the patent fact that the antique allu- 
sions in the plays " have not regard to what we may 
call ' school classics,' but to authors seldom perused but 
by profound scholars " * even to-day: and technical ex- 
ploration, however far it proceeds beyond this in the 
Shakespearean text, can bring evidence only cumula- 
tive as to the result already obtained. But, if we pass 
from the technical structure to the material of the 
plays, we are confronted with the still more amazing 
discovery that, not only the lore of the past was at the 
service of their author, but that' he had no less an ac- 
cess to secrets supposed to be locked in the very womb 
of Time, the discoveries of which, in the as yet dis- 
tant future, were to immortalize their first sponsors' 
For example, Dr. Harvey does not announce — what is 
credited to him 2 — his discovery of the circulation of 

us of the man who wrote " Lear." If there was a Shakespeare 
of earth, as I suspect, there was also one of heaven, and it is of 
him that we desire to know something." Id. Part II, ch. vi, sec. 
35, note. 

1 Smith, p. 85. 

2 Though not, perhaps, universally now-a-days. The late John 
Elliotson declared that the circulation through the lungs had 
certainly been taught seventy years previously by Servetus, who 
was burned at the stake in 1553. Dr. Robert Willis asserts, in 



PART V. — THE BACONIAN THEORY. 209 

the blood in the human system — until 1619 (his book 
was not published until 1628), three years after Wil- 
liam Shakespeare's death. But why need Dr. Harvey 
have resorted to vivisection to make his " discovery " ? 
He need only have taken down his " Shakespeare." 
Is there any thing in Dr. Harvey any more exactly 
definite than the following? 

" I send it through the rivers of your blood, 
Even to the court, the heart, to the seat o' the brain, 
And, through the cranks and offices of man: 
The strongest nerves, and small inferior veins, 
From me receive that natural competency 
"Whereby they live." 

— Coriolanus, Act I, Scene 1. 

41 . . . had baked thy blood, and made it heavy-thick 
(Which, else, runs tickling up and down the veins"). 
— King John, Act III, Scene 3. 



his "Life of Harvey," that the facts he used were familiarly 
known to most of his predecessors for a century previous. Izaak 
Walton states that Harvey got the idea of circulation from Wal- 
ter Warner, the mathematician; and that eminent physician, 
John Hunter, remarks that kServetus first, and Eealdus Columbus 
afterward, clearly announced the circulation of the blood through 
the lungs; and Cisalpinus, many years before Harvey, published, 
in three different works, all that was wanting in Servetus to make 
the circulation complete. Wotton says that Servetus was the first, 
as far as he could learn, who had a distinct idea of this matter. 
Even the Chinese were impressed with this truth some four 
thousand years before Europeans dreamed of it. Plato affirmed 
— "the heart being the knot of the veins, and the fountain from 
whence the blood arises and briskly circulates through all the 
members." This, however, rather adds to than lessens the 
strength of the argument drawn from finding the " discovery " 
in the plays. 

18 



210 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

*'. . . As dear to me as are the ruddy drops 
That visit my sad heart." 

— Julius Cccsar, Act II, Scene 1. 

Harvey's discovery, however, is said to have been 
the theory of Galen, Paracelsus, and Hippocrates 
(who substituted the liver for the heart), and to have 
been held also by Eabelais. Neither Galen, Paracel- 
sus, Hippocrates, nor Eabelais was a text-book at 
Stratford grammar-school during the two terms Mr. 
De Quincy placed William Shakespeare as a pupil 
there — but William has them at his fingers' ends. 
There are said to be no less than seventy-eight pas- 
sages in the plays wherein this fact of the circulation 
of the blood is distinctly alluded to; and, as to Galen 
and Paracelsus, they intrude themselves unrestrictedly 
all through the plays, without the slightest pretext or 
excuse : 

" Parolles. So I say ; both of Galen and Paracelsus. 
Lqfeu Of all the learned and authentic fellows." 

—All's Well that Ends Well, Act II, Scene 3. 

"Host of the Garter Inn. What says my iEsculapius ? my Galen ? " 
— Merry Wives of Windsor, Act II, Scene 3. 

In King Henry VI. Part II., Act ii, Scene 2, the eru- 
dite Bardolph and Falstaff 's classical page make a 
learned blunder about Althea, whom the page con- 
founds with Hecuba. And so on. Are we to believe 
that this sometime butcher's boy and later stage man- 
ager has his head so brimming full of his old Greeks 
and philosophers that he can not for a moment miss 
their company, and makes his very panders and public- 
cans prate of them ? Even if it were the commonest 



PART V. — THE BACONIAN THEu.Y. 211 

thing in the world, nowadays, in 1881, for our Mr. 
Boucicault or Mr. Daly to write a play expressly to 
catch the taste of the canaille of the Old Bowery (or, 
for that matter, of the urbane and critical audiences 
of Wallack's or the Union Square), and stuff all the 
low-comedy parts with recondite and classical allusion 
(for this is precisely what William Shakespeare is said 
to have done for the unroofed play-house in the mud 
of the Bankside in London, some three hundred years 
ago or less, and to have coined a fortune at) — even, 
we say, if it were the simplest thing in the world to 
imagine this sort of play writing to-day, would it be a 
wilder flight of fancy to suggest a pale student in 
London in the days of Queen Elizabeth, somewhere 
among the garrets of Gray's Inn, writing dialogues 
into which Galen and Paracelsus would intrude un- 
bidden — and a stage manager letting them stay there 
as doing no harm (or, may be, taking them for names 
of dogs or wenches — at any rate, as good, mouth- 
filling words, to be paid for at the lowest market 
price) i 1 than to conceive a twelfth manager and pro- 
prietor of this home of the Muses, and whilom sticker 
of calves, after the day's labor, shunning his cups and 
the ribald mirth-making of those sad dogs, his fellow- 

1 Shakespeare married a woman older than himself. Why 
should he call attention to the fact, publish it to the rabble, or 
record it on his stage whenever he found opportunity ? 

See Midsummer-Night's Dream," Act I, Scene 1 — " 0, spite, too 
old to be engaged to young ! " etc. Again — " Too old, by Heaven ! 
Let still the woman take an elder than herself." Again — " Then 
let thy love be younger than thyself," etc., etc. ("Twelfth 
Night," Act II., Scene 4.) 

It is very difficult to suppose that Shakespeare should have 
wantonly in public insulted his own wife (however he might 



212 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

managers, to seek, in the solitude of his library and 
Greek manuscripts, the choice companionship of this 
same Galen and Paracelsus ? 

Newton, who was only born in 1642 — twenty years 
after Shakespeare was laid away in his tomb — surely 
need not have lain under his appletree in the orchard 
at Woolsthorpe, waiting for the falling fruit to reveal 
the immutable truth of gravitation. He had bat to 
take down his copy of " Troilus and Cressida" 
(printed in 1609) to open to the law itself, as literally 
stated as he himself could have formulated it : 

" Cressida. . . But the strong base and building of my love 
Is as the very center of the earth, 
Drawing all things to it." 

— Troilus and Cressida, Act IV. , Scene 2. 

Are we called upon to tax our common sense to 
fancy our manager, on one of his evenings at home, 
after the play at the Globe was over, snugly in his 
library, out of hearing of the ribaldry of his fellows 
over their cups, stumbling upon the laws of the cir- 
culation of the blood and of gravitation, engrossing 
them "without blotting out a line," and sending 
the " copy " to the actors so that they could commit 
it to memory for the stage on the following evening? 

What a library it was — that library up among the 
flies (if they had such things) of the old Globe Thea- 
ter! What an Elihu Burritt its owner must have 
been, to have snatched from his overworked life — from 
the interval between the night's performance and the 

snub her in private) ; though it is very easy to imagine his pass- 
ing it over in another man's manuscript in hurried perusal in 
the green-room." — Chambers s Journal, August 7, 1852, p. 89. 



PART V. — THE BACONIAN THEORY. 213 

morning's routine — the hours to labor over Gralen and 
Paracelsus and Plato in the original Greek ! It was 
miracle enough that the learned blacksmith at his 
forge, in the nineteenth century — surrounded with li- 
braries, and when books could be had for the pur- 
chasing — could have mastered all the known languages- 
But that William Shakespeare, with only two terms 
at Stratford school (or, let us say, twenty years at 
Statford school, or at the University of Oxford — for 
there is as much evidence that he was at Oxford as 
that he was at Stratford school), without books, since 
there were next to no books purchasable, should know 
every thing that was written in books ! Surely there 
never was such a miracle as this ! 

" He was the prophet of geology," says Pullom, 1 
before it found an exponent in Werner ; " 

" O Heaven ! that one might read the book of fate, 
And see the revolution of the times 
Make mountains level, and the continent 
(Weary of solid firmness) melt itself 
Into the sea! and, other times, to see 
The beechy girdle of the ocean 
Too wide for Neptune's hips." 2 

And yet William Shakespeare had but two terms 
of Hunt, Jenkins and Stratford school! And, Mr. 
Malone believed, had never even gone so far into the 
classics as to have read Tacitus ! 3 

What was, or was not, taught at this marvelous 

" History of William Shakespeare, Player and Poet, with 
New Facts and Traditions." By W. S. Fullum, London: Saun- 
ders, Otley & Co., 66 Brook street, 1864. 

2 " King Henry IV.." Part II., Act 3, Scene i. 

3 See ante, p. 88. For the curriculum of Stratford school and 
conjectural methods of instruction therein, see Venus and 
Adonis, a Study in Warwickshire Dialect. New York. The 
Shakespeare Society, 1885. 



214 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

Stratford school, "two terms" of which — between his 
poaching and his beer-bouting — were all the schooling 
William Shakespeare ever had, according to all his 
biographies. (We say, all be ever had, because his 
father was so illiterate that he signed every thing witb 
a mark, and so did his mother, and so did the rest of 
William's family ; and the boy William was too busy 
at skylarking — according to those who knew him — to 
have had much opportunity of private instruction at 
the parental knee, even had the parental acquirements 
been adequate.) Were the theory and practice of the 
common law taught there ? " Legal phrases flow from 
his pen," says Mr. Grant White, " as a part of his vo- 
cabulary and parcel of his thought. . . . This con- 
veyancer's jargon ('fine and recovery,' 'tenure,' 'fee 
simple,' ' fee farm,' etc., etc.) could not have been 
picked up by hanging around the courts in London, 
two hundred and fifty years ago, when suits as to the 
title of real property were comparatively rare. And, 
besides, Shakespeare uses his law just as freely in his 
early plays, written in his first London years, as in 
those produced at a later period." x And not only in 
the technique, but in the groundwork of " that mighty 
and abstruse science, the law of England," is he per- 
fect. A chief justice of England has declared that 
" while novelists and dramatists are constantly making 
mistakes as to the law of marriage, of wills, and of 
inheritance, to Shakespeare's law, lavishly as he ex- 
pounded it, there can neither be demurrer, nor bill of 
exceptions, nor writ of error." 2 Were medicine and 

l " Memoir," p. 47. And see " Was Shakespeare a Lawyer?" 

By H. T . London : Longmans, Green, Reader & Dyer, 1871. 

2 " Shakespeare's Legal Acquirements," Lord Campbell, p. 108. 



PART V. — THE BACONIAN THEORY. 215 

surgery taught there? Dr. Bucknill 1 asserted in 1860 
that it has been possible to compare Shakespeare's 
knowledge with the most advanced knowledge of the 
present day. And not only in the general knowledge 
of a lawyer and a physician, but in what we call in 
these days " medical jurisprudence," the man that 
wrote the historical play of Henry VI. seems to have 
been an expert. Mr. David Paul Brown 2 says that 
in " Frost's case " (a cause celebre of his day), on a trial 
for murder, the defense set up that the deceased had 
committed suicide. A celebrated physician being on 
the stand as an expert on this question, was examined 
as follows : 

Q. What are the general indications of death from 
violence ? 

A. My knowledge will not enable me to answer so 
broad a question. 

And yet Mr. Brown points out that "William 
Shakespeare's knowledge had enabled him" to an- 
swer so " broad a question : " 

" Warwick. See how the blood is settled in his face t 

Oft have I seen a timely parted ghost 

Of ashy semblance, meagre, pale and bloodless. 
******* 

But see, his face is black and full of blood; 

His eyeballs further out than when he lived, 

Staring full ghastly, like a strangled man ; 

His hair upreared, his nostrils stretched with struggling ; 

And see " Shakespeare a Lawyer," by W. L. Kushton. Lon- 
don, 1858. 

1 " Medical Knowledge of Shakespeare." J. C. Bucknill, M. D. 
London, 1860. And see Appendix I. 

2 The Forum. By David Paul Brown. Philadelphia, 1856. 



216 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

His hands abroad displayed, as one that grasped 

And tugged for life, and was by strength subdued. 
* •* ■* -K- ■& * * 

It can not be but he was murdered here; 

The least of all these signs were probable." * 

All the arts, sciences, and literatures must have been 
mastered by our sleepless Shakespeare, either at Strat- 
ford school, or in the midst of his London career, 
when operating two theaters, reading plays for his 
stage, editing them, engrossing the parts for his actors, 
and acting himself. (And Mr. Colin will have it 
that in these unaccounted-for times, he had visited 
Germany with his troupe and performed in all its prin- 
cipal cities, coining money as he went.) 2 Mr. Brown, 
Dr. Bell, and others, announce that they believe that 
these travels of his extended to Italy, and Mr. Thorns 
and Mr. Cohn, to some extent, account for Shakespeare 
on the continent, by believing that, instead of going at 
once to London, when fleeing from Stratford before 
Sir Thomas Lucy, he enlisted under Leicester for the 
Netherlands in 1585, but left the ranks for the more 
lucrative career of an actor. But these theories only 
crowd still more thickly the brief years in which the 
great works (which are, after all, what the world re- 
gards in these investigations), appeared. Either at 
Stratford school, or in the Blackfriars, or else by pure 

1 2 Henry VI., Act 3, scene ii. 

2 " Shakespeare in Germany. By Albert Cohn. London and 
Berlin: Asher & Co., 1865. And see Shakespeare's Autographical 
Poems, by Charles Armitage Brown. Essays on Shakespeare, by 
Karl Elze. London, Macmillan & Co., 1874. The Supposed 
Travels of Shakespeare. Three Notelets on Shakespeare. 
Thorns: London, 1865. 



PART V. — THE BACONIAN THEORY. 217 

intuition, all this exact learning must have been ab- 
sorbed. 

The classical course conducted by Hunt and Jenkins 
must have been far more advanced than is common in 
our modern colleges, in Columbia or Harvard, for ex- 
ample. For not only did Rowe and Knight find traces 
in " Shakespeare " of theElectra of Sophocles, Colman 
of Ovid, Farmer of Horace and Virgil, Steevens of 
Plautus, and "White of Euripides, which are read to- 
day in those universities ; but Pope found traces of 
Dares Phrygius, and Malone of Lucretius, Statius 
and Catullus, which are not ordinarily used as text- 
books to-day in our colleges. 

The name and character of "Imogen" is derived 
from an Italian novel not then — and perhaps not now — 
translated into English. Tschischwitz finds in " Ham- 
let " the philosophy of Giordano Bruno, professor at 
Wittemberg in 1583-86. All these are no stumbling- 
blocks to those who adhere to the Baconian authorship. 

But, Spanish, Italian, Greek and Latin aside, was 
English taught at Stratford school ? If it were, it 
would have been the most wonderful of all, for, as a 
matter of fact in those days, and for many long years 
thereafter, English was a much snubbed acquirement. 
The idea of education was to read, talk, and quote 
Latin, Greek, and the dead languages, the child was 
put to his " accidence," instead of his horn-book, and 
scholars scorned to spend much time on their own ver- 
nacular. But even should we concede that it was 
genius that made the village boy master of a diction 
the grandest of which his mother tongue was capa- 
ble, there is a greater difficulty beyond, over which 
19 



218 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

the concession will not lift us. This difficulty has 
been so succinctly stated by Mr. Grant White, in his 
" Essay Toward the Expression of Shakespeare's Ge- 
nius," that we can not do better than quote his words. 
" It was only in London that those plays could have 
been written. London had but just before Shakes- 
peare's day made its metropolitan supremacy felt as 
well as acknowledged throughout England. As long 
as two hundred years after that time the county of each 
member of Parliament was betrayed by his tongue. 
.... Northumberland, or Cornwall, or Lancashire 
might have produced Shakespeare's mind ; but had 
he lived in any one of those counties, or in another, 
like them remote in speech as in locality from London, 
and written for his rural neighbors instead of for the 
audiences of the Blackfriars and the Globe, the music 
of his poetry would have been lost in sounds uncouth 
and barbarous to the general ear, the edge of his fine 
utterance would have been turned upon the stony 
roughness of his rustic phraseology. His language 
would have been a dialect which must needs have 
been translated to be understood by modern English 
ears." 1 As Mr. White wrote these words, did it not 
occur to him that, by his own chronology, 2 this War- 
wickshire rustic came to London with "Venus and 
Adonis" in his pocket, and began, almost immediately, 
the production of plays, not in the Warwickshire dia- 
lect, which he had grown up in from his birth, but 
in a diction that needs no translating " to be under- 
stood by modern English ears ? " Robert Burns became 

1 Shakespeare's Works, Vol. I., p. cxcvi. 
2 Id., p. cxxi. 



PART V. — THE BACONIAN THEORY. 219 

great in the dialect of his home, which he made into 
music through the alembic of his genius. When, later 
in life, he essayed to write in metropolitan English, 
says Principal Shairp, " he was seldom more than a 
third-rate — a common clever versifier." 1 But this un- 
couth Warwickshire rustic writes, as his first essay in 
English composition, the most elegant verses the age 
produced, and which for polish and care surpass his 
very latest works ! Every step in the received Shakes- 
peare's life appears to have been a miracle : for, accord- 
ing to them, the boy Shakespeare needed to be taught 
nothing, but was born versed in every art, tongue, 
knowledge, and talent, and did every thing without 
tuition or preparation. 

And in the long vacation of this precious school 
how much our worthy pupil — whose paternal parent 
was in hiding from his creditors so that he dare not be 
seen at church — supplemented its curriculum by 
feasts of foreign travel! For it is only the careful 
student of these plays who knows or conceives either 
their wealth of exact reference to the minutest 
features of the lands or the localities in which their 
actions lie, or the conclusions to be drawn there- 
from. There were no guide-books or itineraries of 
Venice published until after William Shakespeare 
had ceased writing for the stage : and yet, while school- 
boy facts — such as that Venice is built in the sea, or 
that gondolas take the place of wheeled vehicles, or 
that there is a leaning tower at Pisa, or a coliseum at 
Verona or Eome — are not referred to (the out-door 
action in " Othello " or the " Merchant of Venice" is 



i (i 



English Men of Letters. Robert Burns. 



220 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

always in a street or open place in that city, canals 
and gondolas being never mentioned), the most casual, 
inadvertant, and trivial details of Italian .matters 
(such as a mere tourist, however he might have ob- 
served, would scarcely have found of enough interest 
to mention to his neighbors on returning home), are 
familiarly and incidentally alluded to, making the phe- 
nomena of all this familiarity with Italy quite too 
prominent to be overlooked. A poet like Samuel 
Rogers writes a poem on Italy. All that is massive, 
venerable, and sublime; all that touches his heart as 
pitiful, or appeals to his nature as sensnous and ro- 
mantic, goes down in his poem. The scenes Mr. Kog- 
ers depicts are those which crowd most upon the cul- 
tivated tourist to-day — the past of history that must stir 
the soul to enthusiasm. But here are plays, written 
before the days of guide-books (and if there had been 
any such things, they would have enlarged upon the 
same features that Mr. Rogers did), which are at home 
in the unobserved details which the fullest Murray or 
Baedeker find it unnecessary to mention. Portia 
sends her servant Balthazar to fetch " notes and gar- 
ments" of her learned cousin, Bellario, and to meet 
her at the u common ferry which trades to Venice." 
There are two characters named " Gobbo" in the play 
— a frequent Venetian name in a certain obscure walk, 
and one which a mere tourist would be most unlikely 
to meet with. Othello brings Desdemona from her 
father's house to his residence in the " Sagittary." 
In " Two Gentlemen of Vorona," Valentine is made 
to embark at Verona for Milan, and in "Taming 
of the Shrew," Baptista is the name of a man. These 
were sneered at as mistakes for some hundred years, 



PART V. — THE BACONIAN THEORY. 221 

until one learned German discovers that Baptista is 
not uncommonly used as a man's name in Italy, 1 
and another learned German that, in the sixteenth cen- 
tury, Milan and Verona were actually connected by 
canals, 2 with which the surface of Italy was inter- 
sected ! 2 etc., etc. Dr. Elze has made a careful colla- 
tion of these instances (which need not detain us here 
except by way of reference), in an essay on the sup- 
posed travels of Shakespeare, 2 wherein he, from the 
same internal evidence, regards it certain that the 
writer (William Shakespeare he calls him), not only 
visited Italy, but Scotland, absorbing all he saw with 
the same microscopical exactness. 

And were the modern languages also taught by this 
myriad-minded Jenkins? Mr. Grant White says em- 
phatically, No ! " Italian and French, we may be sure, 
were not taught at Stratford school." 3 And yet Wil- 
liam Shakespeare borrowed copiously from Boccaccio, 
Cinthio, and Belleforest. 

Ulrici 4 says (quoting Klein) that the author of 
"Borneo and Juliet" must have read " Haclriana," a 
tragedy by an Italian named Groto, and Mr. Grant 
White points out that Iago's speech, a Who steals my 
purse, steals trash," etc., is a perfect paraphrase of a 
stanza in Berni's "Orlando Innamorato," of which 
poem, says Mr. White, to this day (1864) there is no 
English version. Mr. White furnishes a translation of 

1 A Von Beumont. Allgemeine Zeitung, Oct. 21, 1870. 

2 Karl Elze on Shakespeare, p. 296. London. Macmillan & 
Co. 1874. 

3 Memoir. Works, p. xxi. 

4 Vol. I, p. 253. 



222 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

the stanza of Berni, which is certainly startingly like. 1 
And yet Mr. Yv r hite clings to his Stratford school, 
where " Beeston " told Aubrey that William Shakes- 
peare was once a school-master. Perhaps Mr. "White 
refuses to be converted because he has discovered that 
Dr. Farmer discovered that, when, in the " Taming of 
the Shrew," Tranio quotes Terence, " he is inaccurate, 
and gives the passage, not as it appears in the text of 
the Latin dramatist, but as it is misquoted in the Latin 
grammar of William Lily ; a school-book in com- 
mon use among our forefathers when William Shakes- 
peare was a boy." 2 But (though somebody has sug- 
gested that William might have risen to be " head boy" 
at Stratford grammar school ; and been, in that capacity,- 
intrusted with hearing the lessons of the smaller boys, 
whence the school-master story may have arisen), the 
Beeston story has been rejected by all the commenta- 
tors with a unanimity of which, we believe, it is the 
only instance, in case of a Shakespearean detail. So 
far as we know, there has been but one effort to prove 
that William Shakespeare was a university man. 3 
But if, instead of going to school, or operating a 
theater, William had passed his days as a journeyman 
printer, he could hardly have been more at home to 
the mysteries of that craft. Mr. Blades, a practical 
printer, has found in the Works so many terms, tech- 
nical to and employed in the exact sense of the com- 
posing and press-rooms, that they seriously add to 

1 Ante, p. 64, note. 

2 Id. p. xx. 

3 "Some Shakespearean and Spenserian MSS.," "American 
Whig Review," December, 1851. 



PART V. — THE BACONIAN THEORY. 223 

the enumeration of possible Shakesperean vocations. 

For example : 

" Behold, my Lords, 
Although the print be little, the whole matter 
And copy of the father, 
The very mould and frame of hand, nail, finger." 

"Witness, also, the following : 

" You are but as a form in wax, by him imprinted. 

— Midsummer-Night's Dream, I, 1. 

" His heart, with your print impressed. 

— Love's Labours Lost, II, 1. 

A small type, called nonpareil, was introduced into 
English printing houses from Holland about the year 
1650, and became admired and preferred beyond the 
others in common use. It seems to have become 
a favorite type with Shakespeare, who calls many 
of his lady characters " Nonpareils." Prospero calls 
his daughter "a Nonpareil." (Tempest, Act III, 
Scene 2d) Olivia, in " Twelfth Night," is the " Non- 
pareil of Beauty" (Act I, Scene 5), and in Cymbeline, 
Posthumous is made to call Imogen the " Nonpareil 
of her time" (Act II, Scene 5). 

When a certain number of pages of type have been 
composed they are placed in an iron frame called a 
"chase," laid upon an "imposing" stone, a piece of 
beveled wood, called a " sidestick," is placed beside 
the pages, and small wedges of beveled hard wood, 
called " coigns," or " quoins," are tightly driven in, 
holding the pages firmly in their places, and making 
a compact "form." Surely there is an allusion to 
this in Pericles III, 1. 

" By the four opposing coigns 
Which the world together joins." 



224 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

Before the " form " is taken from the stone to be 
put on the press, the quoins are made very tight with 
a " mallet" to insure its "lifting" safely. 

" There is no more conceit in him than there is in a mallet." 

—2 Henry IV, 2. 

• which process is called " locking-up," and when com- 
pleted, the form is said, technically, to be " locked-up," 

or fast. 

"fast locked-up in sleep." 

— Measure for Measure, IV, 2. 

And to what but the care taken by a printer to make 
his forms " register " can we attribute the use of that 
word in Anthony and Cleopatra, Act IV, Scene 9. 

" But let the world rank me in register — 
A master leaver and a fugitive." 

Punctuation is a fruitful source of misunderstanding 
between an author and his printer. Very few authors 
punctuate their manuscript as they would wish to see 
it in the print, and fewer yet are apt to be good 
natured and satisfied when the printer punctuates for 
them. William Shakespeare may have remembered 
this when he wrote : 

" Wherefore stand you on nice points ? " 

— 3 Henry VI, iv, 7. 

" Stand a comma 'tween their amities." 

— Hamlet, V, 2. 

* My point and period, . . . ill or well." 

— Lear, IV. 7. 

"points that seem impossible." 

— Pericles, V, 1. 



PART V. — THE BACONIAN THEORY. 225 

" Puts the period often from his place." 

— Lucrece, line 565. 

" You find not the apostrophes, and so miss the accent." 

" No levelled malice infests one comma." 

— Timon, I, 1. 

"Come we to full points here? And are et ceteras nothing?" 

Possibly a book-worm, or even a bookseller might 
draw as many similes as Shakespeare did, from 
books — as for example : 

" Show me your image in some antique book." 

— Sonnet, 1. ix. 

" Has a book in his pocket with red letters in it." 

—2 Henry VI, iv, 2. 

" My red dominical — my golden letter ! " 

— Love's Labours Lost, V, 2. 

referring to the rubricated editions of books so com- 
mon in the seventh century, or the golden letters used 
in the calendar ; or again, 

" To place upon the volume of your deeds 
As in a title-page, your worth of arms." 

— Pericles, II, 3. 

11 This man's brow, like to a title-leaf, 
Foretells the nature of a tragic volume." 
— 2 Henry IV, 1,1. 
But in the following : 

" The vacant leaves thy mind's imprint will bear." 

— Sonnet, 1. xxvii. 

it is hard to be persuaded that direct allusion is not 



226 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

made to the English custom (which still obtains, as any 
body may see for himself by opening a book printed — 
wherever published — in England) of placing the typo- 
grapher's imprint upon the vacant or extra leaf or 
leaves — where the text runs short, at the end of 
the volume; just as, if an American publisher, who 
buys a hundred copies of an English work, may 
stipulate to have his imprint put upon the title- 
page (or, perhaps, print his own title-page in this 
country), the last page of the book itself will invari- 
ably reveal whether the actual manufacture was in 
England or not ; an analogy which implies technical 
information. An image employed by Othello, who 
takes his wife's hand in his, and says, 

" Here's a young and sweating devil." 

—Othello, III, 4. 

is, Mr. Blades thinks, misunderstood. If his wife's 
palm was the messenger, as Othello suspected, of her 
desires to Cassio, there would be some propriety — 
from a printer's standpoint — in calling it " a devil," 
for a printer's " devil " is his messenger or errand boy: 
though another meaning is not so far fetched in sound 
to a non professional. 

We have mentioned that the Stationer's Company 
was a fraternity composed only of monopolists, each 
of whom had a monopoly, from the crown, of the 
printing of certain books. It was a part of their duty 
to give notice of this monopoly upon every impression 
of the book, precisely as the notice of copyright entry 
is obliged by law to be printed to-day upon copy- 
righted books. The entry was to be expressed, after 
the printer's name, or at least, conspicuously on the 



PART V. — THE BACONIAN THEORY. 227 

title-page, in the formula, " cum privilegio ad impri- 
mendum solum;" and as the formula was to be inces- 
santly used it was undoubtedly "kept standing" in 
the composing room. 

It is curious to notice, in the "Taming of the Shrew," 
Act iv., Scene 4, the recurrence of this formula in a 
speech of Biondello : 

Bion. I can not tell; except they are busied about a counter- 
feit assurance; take you assurance of her cum privilegio ad im- 
primendum solum to the church. 

It is to be noticed that the word "counterfeit" in 
the above speech, was a printer's term in those days; 
and, used in the printer's technical sense, would be ap- 
plicable; for Biondello is counseling Lncertio to marry 
Bianca out of hand, and without waiting for her father 
and his counselor who are discussing the marriage 
treaty. A "counterfeit" was a reprint (as we would 
say now, a " reprint in fac-simile"). 1 

Again : it might be supposed that a country lad 
should know the ways of dogs and birds and beasts 
and creeping things. But it happens to be human 
experience that the country lad is the least likelv 
person to turn out a naturalist. It is much more 
probable that some over- worked shoemaker, in some 
rare escape from his city garret, should find his 
thoughts awakened by watching an ant-hill, and suc- 
ceed in years in making himself an entomologist; than 
that the farmer's boy, who catches bugs every day 
to bait his fish-hook, should turn out an entomolo- 

1 Marahren's Parallel List of technical Typographical Terms — 
art., "Counterfeit." We take the above from Mr. Blades' 
/'Shakespeare and Typography." London, 1872. 



228 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

gist; just as it is not the farmer's daughter, but the 
fashionable young lady from town who tramps the 
fields and tears her hands for wild-flowers or wets her 
feet for the pond lilies. But whoever wrote the plays 
had found time to learn all the ways of these. Says 
Bottom, to Cobweb, the fairy, in " Midsummer Night's 
Dream," "Monsieur, get your weapons in your hand and 
kill me a red-hipped humblebee on the top of a thistle." 
In the United States as well as England, there is no 
more likely place to find a bumblebee in midsummer 
than on a thistle. In "Much Ado about Nothing," Ben- 
edict says to Margaret " Thy wit is as quick as a grey- 
hound's mouth. It catches." The peculiarity of a 
greyhound is that, unlike other clogs, it is able to catch 
game in its mouth as it runs; other hounds must stop 
to do this. In "As You Like It," Celia tells Rosalind 
that Monsieur Le Beau, who comes with his mouth 
full of news, will feed it to them " as pigeons feed 
their young," and Rosalind replies, " Then we shall be 
news crammed." Pigeons bring food to their young 
in their crops, and cram it down their young ones' 
throats, as no other birds do. In "Twelfth Night" 
the clown tells Yiola that "fools are as like husbands 
as pilchards are to herrings — the husband's the bigger." 
The pilchard closely resembles the herring, but is 
thicker and heavier, with larger scales. In the same 
play Maria says of Malvolio, "Here comes the trout 
which must be caught with tickling." Expert 
anglers know that by gently tickling a trout's sides 
and belly, it can be so mesmerized as to be taken 
out of the water with the hand. In "As you Like It," 
we have the lines " For look where Beatrice, like the 
lapwing, runs close by the ground to hear our confer- 



PART V. — THE BACONIAN THEORY. 229 

ence." The lapwing is a kind of plover which is very 
swift of foot and which, when trying to avoid being 
seen, keeps its head close to the ground as it runs. Says 
Lear's fool, " The hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo so long 
that it had its head bit off by its young." The hedge- 
sparrow in England is a favorite bird for the cuckoo 
to impose its young upon. In "All's Well that Ends 
Well," Lafeu says of Parolles " I took this lark for a 
bunting." The English bunting is a field bird of the 
same form and color as the lark, but inferior as a 
singer. And so the figures are always accurate, "the 
ousel-cock so black of hue," " the throstle with his 
note so true," " the wren with little quill," " the russet- 
pated chough, rising and caw T ing at the guns report." 
And so of flowers, as when Perdita speaks of 

— daffodils, 
That come before the swallow dares, and take 
The winds of March with beauty — 

the writer knew that in England the daffodil blooms 
in February and March, while the swallow never ap- 
pears until April. In none of the allusions to nature 
or natural phenomena in the pla}^s, is there any such 
thing as guess work. 1 Now, what was the necessity 
for all this technical, geographical, botanical, and oc- 
cult learning, in a simple drama thrown off by an 
Elizabethan dramatist, earning his living by catering 
to an Elizabethan audience? It was not only unnec- 
essary, but almost fatal to his success. The Eliza- 
bethan audience did not want scientific treatises. But 

x And see further "The natural History of the Insects men- 
tioned in Shakespeare," by K. Paterson. London: A. K. New- 
man & Co., Leadenhall street, 1841. 



230 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

nothing — from governmental polity to the stuffing of 
a fowl — from processes of the human mind to the 
management of kitchen gardens — was too small or 
rude for a philosopher's (let us say for Francis Bacon's) 
vast purposes. How otherwise are they to be ac- 
counted for ? 

That Shakespeare borrowed Greene's famous " sea- 
coast" is a point either way. If he took it sup- 
posing that Bohemia had a sea-coast, the omnipo- 
tent knowledge assigned him by his worshipers failed 
him at least once. And if he knew (as is now claimed, 
though on what authority we know not), that Bohe- 
mia once possessed provinces on the Adriatic, he knew, 
as usual, what the acute research of three hundred 
years has only just developed. And was agriculture 
taught at this Stratford school, and politics and the art 
of war? 1 And was there any thing that William 
Shakespeare did not know ? We are entitled to 
ask these questions, for it must be remembered that, 
before the appearance of the Shakespearean dramas, 
there was practically no literature written in the 
English tongue. To use the words of Macauley, 
"A person who did not read Latin and Greek could 
read nothing, or next to nothing. . . . The Italian 
was the only modern language which possessed any 
thing that could be called a literature." 2 One possess- 
ing, then, merely " small Latin and less Greek," could 
not have written " Shakespeare." Still less could he 
have written it out of Gower and Chaucer, and the 

1 See "Was Shakespeare ever a Soldier?" Three Notelets on 
Shakespeare, by Wm. J. Thorns, London. John Russell Smith, 
1865. 

2 Essays. Lord Bacon. 



PART V. — THE BACONIAN THEORY. 231 

shelf-full of English books that made up all there was 
in English letters. 

But if the Stratford grammar-school confined its 
teachings to the pages of the English bible alone, it 
worked wonders, for Bishop Wadsworth goes so far as 
to declare, that " take the entire range of English liter- 
ature — put together our best authors, who have written 
on subjects not professedly religious, and we shall not 
find, I believe, in them all, printed so much evidence of 
the Bible being read and used, as in Shakespeare alone. 1 
Yet William Shakespeare had little opportunity for 
self-education, except these two terms at Stratford 
school; he was a lad -of- all -work at the Bankside The- 
ater, when a mere child. He was only fifty-two years 
old when he died. He was one of several partners in 
certain theatrical establishments in London, in the 
years when he must have put all this multitudinous 
learning, he had carried in his head so long, on paper. 
He was so active, industrious, and shrewd in those 
years, that he alone of the partners was able to retire 
with a fortune — to purchase lands and a grant of arms 
for his father (whence he himself might become an es- 
quire by descent) ; and, in the years of leisure after 
his retirement, he wrote only three or four epitaphs, 
which no other graduate of Stratford school would 
probably have cared to claim. 

It has only been within the last few years that 
hardy spirits— like Nathaniel Holmes — whose edu- 
cation has led them to look judicially backward from 
effects to causes — and whose experience had impressed 

1 Shakespeare's use of the Bible. By Charles Wadsworth, p. 
345. London. Smith Elder & Co., 1880. 



232 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

them with the idea that most effects come in natural 
procession from causes somewhere — were courageous 
enough to seek the solution of this mystery — not in 
what is called the "internal evidence" of the plays 
themselves, but in the circumstances and surround- 
ings, that is to say, in the external evidence of their 
date and production. 

The Baconian theory is simply that, so far as the 
records of the Elizabethan period are accessible, there 
was but one man in England, at the date at which 
this Shakespearean literature appeared, who could 
have produced it. 1 The history of Bacon's life, his 
massive acquirements, his profound scholarship even 
as a child: his advantages of foreign travel, his ambi- 
tious acquaintance with the court : and, joined to all, 
his dire necessities and his successive retirements (the 
dates of which, when collated, coincide with the 
dates of the plays tallying in matter with the cir- 
cumstantial surroundings of Bacon's life (as, for exam- 
ple, Shylock appeared at about the time when Bacon 
was most helplessly in the toils of what he calls "the 
Lombardo") : — all this need not be recapitulated here. 
He was born and bred in the atmosphere of libraries. 
While William Shakespeare was poaching on Avon 
banks, the little Francis was impressed with the utter 
inadequacy of Aristotle's method to grapple with 

1 Had the plays come down to us anonymously, had the labor 
of discovering the author been imposed upon after-generations, 
I think we could have found no one of that day but Bacon to 
whom to assign this crown. In this case it would have been 
resting now on his head by almost common consent." — (W. H. 
Furness to Judge Holmes, third edition of "Authorship of 
Shakespeare," p. 628). 



PART V. — THE BACONIAN THEORY. 233 

modern needs, and meditating its supersedure with 
labors of Lis own. The gray-haired Queen, who in 
youth had called him her little Lord Keeper, will 
not lift a band to aid him in his poverty, or to advance 
him in the State, regarding him as a man of study 
rather than of practice and experience; and so Bacon 
is known to have remained, bemoaning (as he himself 
says in a letter to Burleigh, written in 1592) "the 
meanness of my [his] estate ; for though I can not ac- 
cuse myself that I am either prodigal or slothful, yet my 
health is not to spend, nor my course to get. 1 '' This 
is the very year, 1592, in which Robert Greene " dis- 
covers that a new poet bas arisen who is becoming the 
only shake-scene in a county ; " and so far forgets 
himself as to become " jealous" of William Shakes- 
peare, who, up to this time, has only been a " Johannes 
Factotum," of not much account until he borrows 
" our feathers." 2 And so, until 1613, Bacon is driven 
to the Jews. Why should he not, in his pressing 
necessity for "lease of quick revenue," bethink him 
of the resources within himself, and seek a cover 
whereunder — without embarrassing his hope of future 
preferment — he may turn into gold his years of study 
and travel, by means of a quick pen ? 

In 1613, when he is suddenly created attorney-gen- 
eral, the Shakespearean plays cease abruptly, to appear 
no more for ever. William Shakespeare closes out his 
theatrical interest in London, and retires, to money- 
lending (as some say), in Stratford. He dies in 1616. 
Lord Bacon reaches his highest pinnacle of greatness, 

1 Spedding, "Letters and Life of Bacon," vol. i, p. 108. 
2 Ante, p. 125 
20 



234 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

and falls, in 1621. In 1623, while Bacon is again 
spending his time in the strictest privacy and retire- 
ment, there suddenly appears a folio, " The Complete 
Works of William Shakespeare," amended, revised, 
enlarged, and improved, including at least seventeen 
(Mr. Smith says twenty-three) plays which had never 
appeared or been heard of in Shakespeare's lifetime. 

Few of us — outside the ranks of commentators, like 
Mr. Grant White, and others, who give their valuable 
lives to this study — dream how vast were the emenda- 
tions and revisions, enlargements and corrections of 
the old Shakespearean plays given to the world in this 
folio of 1623. Mr. White says that in the one play of 
" Love's Labours Lost " there are inserted new lines 
in almost every speech. 1 Another, " The Merry Wives 
of Windsor," according to Knight, 2 has double the 
number of lines it originally possessed in 1600. The 
"Henry V." has nineteen hundred new lines. The 
" Titus Andronicus " has an entire scene added, and 
the "Much Ado about Nothing" and "The Lear" 
are so altered and elaborated, with curtailment here 
and enlargement there, as to lead Mr. Knight to de- 
clare that " none but the hand of the master could 
have superadded them." 3 But, if William Shakes- 
peare was the "master," how did his hand reach up 
out of the grave under Stratford chancel, where it had 
rested seven years, to make these improvements? 
And if William Shakespeare in his lifetime made those 
revisions for Heminges and Condell (who appear on 
the title-page of this folio of 1623 as editors, and an- 

1 Cited by Holmes, " Authorship of Shakespeare," third edition, 
p. 71. 

2 " Studies of Shakespeare," p. 337. 8 Id. 



PART V. — THE BACONIAN THEORY. 235 

nounce in the preface that this edition is printed from 
the "true original copies") at Stratford (where, ac- 
cording to his own inventory, he had neither library 
nor books — nor bookcase, nor writing table, for that 
matter), why did he not print them himself, for his 
own benefit, instead of performing all this labor of 
emendation for somebody else? He could not have 
been fearful lest he would lose money by them, for 
they had been the foundation and source of all his 
fortune. Nor had he grown, in his old age, indiffer- 
ent to gain (let the ghost of the poor " delinquent for 
malt delivered" assure us of that!). He could not 
have revised them for pure glory : for, in his previous 
career, while in London, he had shown no interest in 
them, permitting them to be surreptitiously printed 
by whoever, in the same town with himself, listed so 
to do. He had even allowed them to be mixed up 
with other people's trash, his name signed to all in- 
differently, and the whole made footballs of by the 
London printers, under his very nose, without so much 
as lifting a voice in protest, or to declare which were 
his and which were not. 1 Besides, if he had revised 
them for the glory of his own name, why did he not 
cause them to be printed? Nor can we suppose that 
he was employed to revise them, for pay, by Heminges 
and Condell, because, if they did so employ him, why 
did they carry the expense of the revision for seven 
]ong years, until he and his wife were both in their 
graves, before reimbursing themselves by printing the 
first folio for the market ! Last, and most wonderful 

x See post, "The New Theory," where it appears that, at the 
time Shakespeare was producing certain plays on his stage, cer- 
tain others were being printed and circulated, as his, outside. 



236 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

of all, in this first folio are included all these en- 
tirely new plays which had never been heard of be- 
fore! Who wrote those, and why? The answer to 
these riddles, the Baconians say, is that, when again 
at leisure, Bacon bethought himself of his scattered 
progeny, and — whether proposing to publicly own 
them or not — whether to secure them for posterity or 
merely for his own pastime — he devoted that leisure to 
a revision of the works by means of which he had 
bridged the first long interval in his career. At any 
rate, when the revision appeared, it is matter of fact 
that William Shakespeare was dead and in his grave, 
and speculation has nothing to do with that. 

Besides the coincidence of the plays appearing dur- 
ing Bacon's first retirement : ceasing altogether at his 
first elevation, and appearing in revised and improved 
form again after his final downfall, and during his 
second privacy, the Baconians cite : I. Contemporary 
statements, which include (A), Sir Tobie Matthew's 
famous postscript : l " The most prodigious wit of these 
times is of your name, though he be known by an- 
other" (which Mr. Weiss 2 explains, very lamely in our 
opinion, by arguing that the other name by which 
Bacon was known, and to which Matthew alludes, was 
" Viscount St. Albans) ; (B), a letter from Bacon him- 

1 Bacon was in the habit of sending certain of his lighter man- 
uscripts to Sir Tobie, and this postscript was appended to a letter 
acknowledging the receipt of Bacon's " great and esteemed favor 
of the 9th of April." 

2 "Wit, Humor and — Shakespeare." By John Weiss. Boston. 
Roberts Brothers, 1876. Matthew writes this in a letter ac- 
knowledging receipt of a volume sent him by Bacon. If that 
volume was a copy of the "First Folio," the postscript would be 
intelligible. 



PART V. — THE BACONIAN THEORY. 237 

self, to Sir John Davies, who is going to meet the new 
king James (with whom Bacon is striving for favor, 
looking to his own preferment), in which he commits 
to Sir John's "faithful care and discretion " his inter- 
ests at court, and adds, " So, asking you to he good to 
concealed poets, I continue," etc., etc.; 1 II. Evidence by 
way of Innuendo, including another of Matthew's 
postscripts (the one in which he writes to Bacon, "I 
will not return you weight for weight, but measure for 
measure," etc.); also, perhaps, the injunctions of 
secrecy in Bacon's own letters to Matthew, to "be 
careful of the writings submitted to you, that no one 
see them." There is, besides, in many of Bacon's pre- 
served letters something suggestive of a "curious under- 
meaning, impressing the reader with an idea of more 
than appears on the surface." The idea of the stage, as 
a figure of speech, occurs in a letter to the Queen : 
" Far be it from me to stage myself," etc.; and in one 
to lady Buckingham, " I do not desire to stage myself 
but for the comfort of a private life," etc. " Dramatic 
poesy," he declares, " is as history made visible." 
Writing to Matthew, he refers to a " little work of 
my recreation;" and Matthew, in return, banters him 
on writing many things " under another name." This 
is in 1609, and no more " Shakespeare " plays appear 
until Othello, in 1621. The Jonson obituary verse — 
in which occur the encomiums so rung in our ears by 
the Shakespeareans (and which we have — earlier in 
these pages — seen was all they really had behind them), 
which we have thought could be most easily explained 
on the " nil mortuis nisi bonum" theory — are also re- 

1 Holmes, " Authorship of Shakespeare," 



238 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

garded, we believe, by the Baconians, as Innuendo. 1 
III. The Parallelisms. That is to say, an almost 
identity of phraseology, found in both the Baconian 
and Shakespearean writings. The best list of these is 
to be found in Judge Holmes' book, covering some 
twenty-five closely-printed pages. 2 Of the value of 
this latter class of evidence, it is for every reader to 
judge for himself; but that a writer of exact science 
and moral philosophy should plagiarize from the 
theater, or the theater from the writer of exact science 
and moral philosophy ; or (still more improbable) that 
two contemporary authors, in the full glare of the 
public eye, should select each other's works to habitu- 
ally and regularly plagiarize upon, are altogether, it 
seems to the Baconians, out of the question. But 
even the conceiving of so unusual a state of affairs as 
a political philosopher and playwright contracting 
together to mutually plagiarize from each other's writ- 

*It is curious to find the Baconians appealing to this "best evi- 
dence " for the other side. But they read it as an Innuendo. 
For example, the verses — 

"Shine forth, thou star of poets, and with rage 
Or influence, cheer the drooping stage! 

Which — since thy flight from hence, hath mourned like night 
And despaired day— hut for thy volume's light — " 

they say, do not and can not, refer to William Shakespeare at 
all. For this was published in 1623, and William Shakespeare 
had been dead seven years. He could not " shine forth " again, 
except figuratively, in his volume, and this he already does by 
the publication of his works, and is admitted to do in the next 
line, where it is said that but for " thy volume's light" the stage 
would " mourn in night." The Baconians, who believe that Ben 
Jonson himself was the " Heminges and Condell " who edited the 
first folio, regarded this whole poem as a sop to Bacon, on Ben 
Jonson's part. 
2 Pp. 306-326. 



PART V. — THE BACONIAN THEORY. 



239 



ings would hardly account for the coiucidence between 
the cottage scene (Act IV, Scene 3) in "A Winter's 
Tale," and Bacon's "Essay on Gardens," in which he 
maintained that " there ought to be gardens for all the 
mouths of the year; in which severally things of 
beauty may be in their season," which he proceeds to 



suggest : 

BACON. 

For December and January, 
and the latter part of Novem- 
ber, you must take such things 
as are green all winter . . . 
rosemary . . . lavender . . . 
marjoram. 

BACON. 

Primroses for March, there 
come violets, especially the sin- 
gle blue — the yellow daffodil: 
in April follow the double 
white violet, the cowslip, flower- 
de-luce, and lilies of all natures, 
the pale daffodil. 



In May and June come pinks 
of all sorts: the French mari- 
gold, lavender in flowers; in 
July come gilliflowers of all va- 
rieties. 



PERDITA. 

. . , Eeverend sirs, 
For you there's rosemary, and 

rue ; these keep 
Seeming and savor all the win- 
ter long. 

PERDITA. 

. . . daffodils, 

That come before the swallow 
dares, and take 

The winds of March with beau- 
ty ; violets dim 

. . . pale primroses . . . 
bold oxlips, and 

The crown-imperial ; lilies of all 
kinds, 

The flower-de luce being one! 

Sir, the year growing ancient — 

Not yet on summer's death, nor 
on the birth 

Of trembling winter, — the fair- 
est flowers o' the season 

Are our carnations, and streak- 
ed gillyvors, . . . 

Hot lavender, mints, savory, 
marjoram ; 

The marigold, that goes to bed 
with the sun ; 

And with him rises, weeping; 

These are flowers of middle 
summer. 



240 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

"Were we assured that the prose in the left-hand col- 
umn was the poet's first rough notes for the exquisite 
poetry in the second, would there be any internal evi- 
dence for doubting it? And when it appears that 
" The Essay on Gardens" was not printed until 1625, 
nine years after William Shakespeare's death and bur- 
ial, and two years after an edition of his alleged plays, 
rewritten and revised, had appeared (when so delib- 
erate a " steal " would hardly be profitable), the ex- 
oteric evidence seems at least to command attention. 

A coincidence between a passage in " The Advance- 
ment of Learning " and in the play of " Troilus and 
Cressida," Act II., Scene 2 (which, we shall see later 
on, first appeared in print, advertised as the work of 
a novice, in 1609, thereafter, within a few months, to 
be reissued as by William Shakespeare 1 — who was not, 
at the date of that edition, either a novice or a first 
appearance), is worth pausing to tabulate : 

BACON. HECTOR. 

Is not the opinion of Aristotle . . . Not much 

worthy to be regarded, where he Unlike young men, whom Aris- 
saith that young men are not fit totle thought 
auditors of moral philosophy, Unfit to hear moral philosophy, 
because they are not settled 
from the boiling heat of their 
affections nor attuned by time 
and experience? 

That the manager of a theater, in dressing up a play 
for the evening's audience (and such an audience) 
should tuck in an allusion to Aristotle, to " catch the 

1 Post, " The New Theory." 

2 It is to be noticed that no similarity of style in these opposed 
extracts is alleged or relied upon. 



PART V. — THE BACONIAN THEORY. 241 

ear of the groundlings" — or, finding it already in, 
should not have a sufficient acquaintance with Aris- 
totle to scent an impropriety and take it out — is no less 
or no more absurd than that a philosopher, in compos- 
ing so profound and weighty an essay as the "Advance- 
ment of Learning," should go to a cheap play-house 
for his reference to the Greek sage. If Bacon did at- 
tend the theater that night to learn the opinion of 
Aristotle (whom he had criticised at college at the age 
of fifteen) on young blood and philosophy, he was 
misled, for Aristotle said not that young men ought 
not to hear moral, but ought not to study "political phil- 
osophy. And the error itself is proof positive — it 
seems to the Baconians — of an identical source for the 
two passages. It must not be forgotten, however, that 
the evidence from these coincidences is cited not to an 
Anti-Shakespearean case — which is purely historical 
— but as cumulative to the Baconian case alone. And 
yet, though the evidence from the " parallelisms " is 
the least forcible of any presented by the Baconians, 
so systematically do they occur that the ablest Bacon- 
ian writer (Judge Holmes) claims that he has been able 
to reduce them to an ordo, and to know precisely 
where to expect them, by reference merely to a history 
of the life of Lord Bacon, and the date of the produc- 
tion. " When I got your ' Letters and Life of Bacon,' " 
he writes to Mr. Spedding, " and read that fragment 
of a masque; having the dates of all the plays in my 
mind, I felt quite sure at once in which I should find 
that same matter, if it appeared anywhere (as I expected 
it would) and went first straight to the ' Midsummer- 
Night's Dream/ and there came upon it, in the second 
21 



242 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

act, so palpably and unmistakably that I think noth- 
ing else than a miracle could shake my belief in it." 1 

The facts that Lord Bacon expressed himself to the 
effect that the best way of teaching history was by 
means of the drama; that there is a connected and 
continuous series of historical plays (covering by 
reigns the entire period of the War of the Roses), in 
the Shakespearean drama " from ' King John/ by way 
of prelude — in which the legitimate heir to the throne 
is set aside, and the nation plunged into civil war — to 
' Richard III.,' where the two roses are finally united 
in one line in Henry VII., and winding up with the 
reign of Henry VIII. — wherein, as a grand finale to 
the whole, the splendor of the new line is shown 
in its reunited vigor" — which (with but one hia- 
tus, the missing reign of Henry VII.) is one 
complete cycle of English history ; and that, 
among the remains of Francis Bacon, is a manu- 
script " History of Henry VII." found, which might 
well be the minutes for a future drama (the opening 
paragraph of which seems to be a recapitulation 
of the last scene of the Richard III. of the dramas), 
is certainly startling. Not necessarily connected with 
this discovery is the further fact that Mr. Spedding 
has found, in the library of Northumberland house, 
among certain of Bacon's manuscripts, a slip of paper, 
upon which is scrawled eight times, in a clerky hand 
(not Bacon's), the name " William Shakespeare," to- 
gether with the names of certain of the known 
Shakespearian Historical plays, and of certain (as 
Judge Holmes conjectures) other plays not now 

1 "Authorship of Shakespeare," third edition, p. 621. 



PART V. — THE BACONIAN THEORY. 243 

known. 1 But there is nothing in this discovery more 
startling 1 than the numberless other coincidences — if 
they be nothing more — which Judge Holmes has 
massed in his scholarly work. 

Henry Chettle, in 1603, in his "England's Mourning 
Garment (a rhyme)," wonders that "Melicert does not 
drop a single sable tear" over the death of " Our Eliza- 
beth.''* It might, indeed, seem strange had William 
Shakespeare (supposing these lines to apply to him) 
been the favorite he is said to have been with Elizabeth. 
But, while neither Shakespeare nor Bacon sing mor- 
tuary strains, of the two (if these stories about Eliza- 
beth's love for Shakespeare are true) it is certainly not 
strange that Bacon did not; for Bacon, at least, had 
no cause to idolize his queen. 

Ben Jonson's eulogies of Shakespeare, in verse, no- 
where surpass, as we have seen, his eulogies of Bacon, 
in prose. He calls Lord Bacon " the dx/ur/j of our lan- 
guage," and, as Mr. Thompson suggests, " no pinnacle 
has two acmes." " On every variety of court enfold- 
ing," continues that writer, " was Bacon daily em- 
ployed, writing in others' names ; and, if we do not 
think worse of Plato for personating Socrates, or of 
Cicero for personating Cato," neither should ill bo 
thought of Bacon for borrowing a name "to cover his 
aim," etc. 2 Meanwhile, "this dx/wj of our language 
was poor and a borrower." In 1605, is published an 
anonymous pamphlet, called " Ratsei's Ghost." In it, 
one Ratsei, a highwayman, is about to be hung, and 
gives some parting advice to a strolling player ; tells 

1 Holmes' "Authorship of Shakespeare," 3d edition, pp. 657— 
682. 

2 The Kenascence Drama, p. 59. 



244 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

him to go to London, where he would learn to be 
frugal and thrifty ; to feed upon all men, but let none 
feed on him; make his hand stranger to his pocket, 
his heart slow to perform his tongue's promise ; and 
when he felt his purse well lined, to buy some place 
of lordship in the country; that, growing weary of 
playing, his money may then bring him to dignity and 
reputation ; that he need care for no man — no, not for 
them that before made him proud with speaking their 
words on the stage." " If this satirical passage," says 
Mr. Thompson, "plainly alludes to him who went to 
London very meanly, and came, in time, to be exceed- 
ingly wealthy, it confirms Greene's saying, that 
Shakespeare made his money by acting, not by writ- 
ing, plays, and by usury." l 

As to Miss Bacon's question, " What did William 
Shakespeare do with Bacon's manuscripts?" Mr. 
Thompson 2 seems to think that they may yet be 
brought to light. They " appear to have beeu so many 
times hypothetically burned, at Stratford, in the Globe 
theater, the London fire, by their owners (by purchase) 
at the play-house, to hinder rivals from using them," 
that Mr. Thompson argues that " it is probable they 
are still to the fore." Bacon's Will directs certain pa- 
pers laid away in boxes, cabinets, and presses, to be 
collected, sealed up, and put away, " so as not to have 
them ready for present publication." He was " not 
ignorant that those kind of writings would, with less 
pains and embracement (perhaps), yield more luster 
and reputation to my name, than those other which I 

1 Id., p. 209. 

2 Kenascence Drama, or History made Visible. By William 
Thompson. Melbourne, 1880. 



PART V. — THE BACONIAN THEORY. 245 

have in hand." They could bide their time, an , since 
William Shakespeare and his fellows do not dispose 
of them, the inference is that they were not allowed 
to retain them. 

The Baconian theory, it is to be noticed, is quite in- 
different as to whether William Shakespeare, on first 
turning up at London, found employment (as Mr. 
Grant White asserts) in his "cousin's law-office" or 
not : or whether, at any stage in his career, either in 
Stratford or London, he was an attorney's clerk, hard 
'prentice at the trade of " noverint." (By which slur 
Mr. Fullom believes that Nash meant, not that Shakes- 
peare was a u noverint," but that the young " nove- 
rints" of the time w^ere " Shakespeares;" that is to 
say, that they scribbled, out of hand, for the stage.) 
The Shakespearean problem is neither increased nor 
diminished by the proposition ; even an attorney's 
clerk could not have written all the Shakespearean 
pages. Should it be necessary, however, to find a law- 
student in London who could have managed some of 
them, w T hy not allow Francis Bacon his claim among 
the rest ? He has, at least, this advantage of his rival ; 
that, while it is the general impression now-a-days 
that William Shakespeare was not a law-student, as a 
matter of fact Francis Bacon was. 1 

1 And too good a law student, we think, to have written the 
law in the " Merchant of Venice." For, although Lord Bacon 
was apt to discover the public feeling, and quick to array him- 
self on the right side (and spitting at Jews has always been ac- 
counted of Gentiles for righteousness), he must have seen that 
Shylock had a standing in court on the merits of his case. 

But Portia begins her extraordinary (according to common 
law at least) judgment by deciding for the Jew in that, not hav- 
ing paid the principal sum, Antonio must suffer in the foreclosure 



246 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

As to the bibliography of the Baconian theory, 
there are two volumes which will probably always 
remain its text-books, viz., Judge Holmes's book, of 
which the first edition appeared in 1866 : and Mr. 
Smith's, printed in 1857, which made a convert of 

of the mortgage, as it were, upon his person. This is against the 
letter of any known law, which gives an equity of redemption to 
the debtor in all such cases. Her next decision is, that the Jew 
has his election between the principal sum and the penalty, and 
that, with his election, not the law itself can interfere. This, 
again, is not law ; for the law abhors a penalty, and even in a 
foreclosure will not allow the debtor to be mulcted in more than 
the face of his debt, interest, and costs. But now, having de- 
cided, against all law, for the Jew, Portia begins deciding for the 
Christian, and the first point she makes is that, when Shylock 
takes his pound, he must not take a hair's weight more or less, 
nor yet one ounce of blood. This, again, is clearly not law, since it is 
an eternal principle of jurisprudence that, when the law grants any 
thing it also grants everything that is necessary to the conversion 
of that thing to possession (as, when it grants a farm, it likewise 
tacitly grants a right of way to that farm). So, if Shylock had had 
any title to his pound of flesh, he would certainly have had a title 
to draw as much blood as it was absolutely necessary to draw in 
cutting out that pound, and such portions of flesh over and above 
a pound as it would be absolutely necessary to cut out, providing 
the cutting out was done by a skillful operator and not a bungler. 
Astounded at this turn of the tide, Shylock deliberates, and 
finally cries, " Well, give me my principal and let me go !" Por- 
tia thereupon renders her fourth decision, which is the most as- 
tounding of all — namely, that, having once refused a tender of 
the money in open court, the Jew is not entitled to change his 
mind and take it! Since the days of Moses — certainly since the 
days of Littleton — a tender has never quite destroyed a debt, 
but only the interest and costs accruing upon it, after the ten- 
der! Such a glaring and high-handed sacrifice of common law 
and common sense to stage effect might have been conceived 
of by a manager anxious for the plaudits and pence of a crowded 
house, scarcely by a future lord chancellor of England. 



PART V. — THE BACONIAN THEORY. 247 

Lord Palmerston. Mr. Wilkes's exceedingly fresh 
and readable work, " Shakespeare from an American 
Point of View/' and Mr. King's " Bacon versus 
Shakespeare ; a Plea for the Defendant," as text- 
books on the other side, could hardly be expected to 
produce much disorder in Messrs. Holmes and Smith's 
stern and compact columns of facts and argument. 

Mr. Wilkes 1 decides off-hand against this Bacon- 
ian theory at the start, and then goes on, like his 
predecessors, to construct a Shakespeare to suit him- 
self. It is to his praise that he has endeavored to con- 
struct this Shakespeare out of the Shakespearean 
pages, rather than to have unreined his fancy. B-ut he 
makes his own particular Shakespeare, nevertheless. 
The Wilkes Shakespeare is a Romanist. We con- 
sider this to William Shakespeare's praise, for to be a 
good Romanist is to be a good Christian, and to be 
one in a Protestant reign is to be a consistent Chris- 
tian as well. But this is all the good Mr. Wilkes's 
Shakespeare is. Beyond that he is base-born, a man 
despised of his equals, and a flunkey and tidewaiter 
at the knees of an aristocracy to which he can not at- 
tain — an obscene jester, etc., etc. — and this author he 
calls Shakespeare. Such a one, whoever he is, is 
neither Bacon nor Raleigh, at all events. In 1880, 
Mr. Thompson, of Melbourne, Australia, published a 
volume, "Renascence Drama; or, History made Vis- 
ible," 2 devoted to an accumulation of fact and argu- 
ment — rather than to a presentation of the case al- 
ready made — in favor of the Baconian theory. Mr. 

1 Shakespeare from an American Point of View. New York: 
D. Appleton & Co., 1877. 

2 Melbourne : Sands & McDougall, Collins street, west, 1880. 



248 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

Thompson aims to answer the more refined objections 
to that theory, by showing that Bacon's mind and art 
rather overgrasped than undergrasped the matter and 
form of these Shakespearean drama, and his work is 
an extremely valuable and charming contribution to 
the pro-Baconian view. 

In his abounding zeal for " our Shakespeare," Mr. 
King 1 gives us much eulogy, very little argument, and 
remakes but one or two points, namely, that a large 
proportion of the Shakespearean characters are made 
to bear Warwickshire names, such as Ford, Page, 
Evans, Hugh, Oliver, Sly, Marion Hacket, the fat ale- 
wife of Wincot, Curtis, Burton Heath, Fluellen, Bar- 
dolph, and so on ; and that certain expressions which 
have puzzled commentators, such as "make straight" 
(meaning " make haste "), " quoth " (meaning " went "), 
the use of the word " nie " in place of " for me," u old " 
for " frequent," etc., are Warwickshire expressions, and 
current in no other parts of England. But, by consult- 
ing any " Dictionary of Provincialisms used in Shakes- 
peare," Mr. King will discover that besides Warwick- 
shire, 1 the plays contain traces of about every other 
known British dialect. And if, as has been suggested, 
Mr. Manager Shakespeare dressed up his friends' dia- 
logues for his own stage, and tucked in the clowns and 
jades, this usage of Warwick names might well be ac- 
counted for. Four of these names are taken out of 
"The Merry Wives of Windsor," and three of them 
from the induction to the " Taming of the Shrew " — 
matter in the composition of which Shakespeare or 

1 Bacon and Shakespeare: A Plea for the Defendant. By- 
Thomas King. Montreal : Lovell Printing and Publishing Com- 
pany, 1875. 



PART V.— THE BACONIAN THEORY. 249 

any other playwright might have had the largest hand, 
without entitling himself to any Olympus. And if, 
in the dressing up, Shakespeare inserted a clown or a 
sot here and there, to make sport, what would be 
more natural than that he should put into their mouths 
the argot he had grown up amid in his boyhood, and 
make the drunken turnkey in " Macbeth " to say, with 
hiccoughs, " If a man were porter of hell-gate, he 
should have old turning the key?" For, as Mr. King 
can see for himself, the cardinals and kings do not use 
these phrases; nor, we may add, are the surnames he 
particularizes ever bestowed on them, but only on the 
low-comedy characters of the plays. 

Surely, if William Shakespeare ever were forced 
"upon the country," as the lawyers say, as against my 
Lord Bacon, he would wish his case to the jury rather 
without Mr. King's " plea " than with it. As a " plea " 
on any side of an historical question, it is, to be sure, 
nothing, if not candid ; but, as a personal appeal to 
posterity to, willy-nilly, believe that certain players 
and others in the age of Elizabeth knew not guile, it 
is touching and beautiful in the extreme. " Who shall 
say Heminges and Condell lied?" 1 " Could rare Ben 
Jonson, who is worthy of our love and respect, have 
lied ?" 2 Did Shakespeare practice a deceit upon his 

1 " Bacon versus Shakespeare: A Plea for the Defendant." By- 
Thomas King. Montreal, and Rouse's Point, New York : Lovell 
Printing, etc., Company, 1875, p. 9. 

2 Ibid., p. 10. Heminges and Condell " profess that ' they have 
done this office to the dead only to keep the memory of so 
worthy a friend and fellow alive as was our Shakespeare.' Yet 
their utter negligence, shown in their fellow's volume, is no ev- 
idence of their pious friendship, nor perhaps of their care or 
their intelligence. The publication was not, I fear, so much an 



250 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

noble and generous patron ? Could he be guilty of a 
lie?" 1 And so on. To much the same effect (the 
reverence clue the name " Shakespeare," the improba- 
bility of Jonson and others telling an untruth, etc.) is 
an anonymous volume, " Shakespeare not an Impostor, 
by an English Critic," 2 published in 1857 ; and finally ? 
in 1877, was published a paper, read before the Royal 
Society of Literature, by C. M. Ingleby, M. A., LL.D., 
a vice-president 3 of the same. Dr. Ingleby is severe 
upon all anti- Shakespearean s, whose minds he likens 
to " Macadam's sieves," which " retain only those in- 
gredients which are unsuited to the end in view " 
(whatever that may mean), and thinks that "the pro- 
fession of the law has the inevitable effect of fostering 
the native tendency of such minds." Unlike the oth- 
ers, however, Dr. Ingleby does not confine himself to 
expressions of his interest in the anti-Shakespeareans 
"as examples of wrong-headedness," but attempts an 
examination of the historical testimony. In favor of 
the Shakespearean authorship, he names seven wit- 
nesses, viz., John Harrison, Francis Meres, Robert 
Greene, Henry Chettle, Heminges, Condell, and Ben 
Jonson. John Harrison was the printer (publisher) 
who published the "Venus and Adonis" in 1593, and 
the "Lucrece" in 1594. Each of these was without 

offering of friendship as a pretext to obtain the copyright.'' 
(Disraeli, "Amenities of Authors — Shakespeare.") 
ilbid., p. 13. 

2 George Townsend (according to Allibone), London : Gr. Eout- 
ledge & Co., Farringdon street, 1857. 

3 " Shakespeare : The Man and the Book." London: Josiah 
Adams, Triibner & Co., 1877, Part I., p. 38. " The Authorship of 
the Works attributed to Shakespeare." 



PART V. — THE BACONIAN THEORY. 251 

an author's name on the title-page, though each was 
dedicated to Southampton, in an address dedicatory, 
signed "William Shakespeare." This is all that the 
Harrison evidence amounts to, except that Dr. Ingleby 
says, "It is to me quite incredible that Harrison would 
have done this unless Shakespeare had written the 
dedications, or at least had been a party to them." x 
As to Meres, anybody can see by reading him that he 
wrote as a critic, and not as an historian. 2 To subpoena 
Greene as a witness to Shakespeare's genius, is at least 
a bold stroke ; for, as has been seen, Greene is very 
emphatic to the effect that "William Shakespeare was 
a mere "Johannes Factotum," or Jack-of-all-trades, 
who trained in stolen plumage, and the Shakespeareans 
(Dr. Ingleby alone excepted) have universally exerted 
themselves to break the force of this testimony by 
proving Greene a drunkard, jealous, etc. 3 Greene 

1 Ibid., p. 42. 

2 " Palladis Tamia, Wit's Commonwealth," 1598. 

3 That Robert Greene was much more than a drunkard and a 
pretender, but that, to the contrary, he had many admirers who 
were not unaware of the effrontery of his debtor, Shakespeare, 
a search among the old literature of the day would reveal. In 
a quarto tract, dated 1594, "Greene's Funeralls, by R. B., Gent.," 
is a copy of verses, the last stanza of which runs : 

" Greene is the pleasing object of an eye 

Greene pleased the eye of all that looked upon him; 
Greene is the ground of every painter's dye, 

Greene gave the ground to all that wrote upon him: 
Nay, more; the men that so eclipsed his fame, 
Purloined his plumes, can they deny that same?" 

Hallam believes that the last two lines are directed principally 
at William Shakespeare. (" Literature of Europe," Part II., 
ch. vi., p. 32, note.) 

A selection of his poems, edited by Lamb, is printed 
in Bonn's Standard Library. But by far the most careful ac- 



252 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

was a graduate of Cambridge — a learned man — " one 
of the fathers," says Lamb, " of the English stage." 
He does not seem to have approved of William Shakes- 
peare's borrowing his plumes ; but the impression that 
he was a monster of debauchery and drunkenness is de- 
rived wholly from his own posthumous work, " The Con- 
fessions of Robert Greene," etc., London, 1592, which 
lays the black paint on so thickly that it should have 
put the critics on their guard. Greene was probably 
no worse than his kind. Henry Chettle edited Greene, 
and personally deprecated some of its hard sayings as 
to Shakespeare, on account of his (Shakespeare's) be- 
ing a clever,.civil sort of fellow, and of "his facetious 
grace in writing;" but more particularly, no doubt, 
because " divers of worship" had taken him up, and he 
(Chettle) did not wish to appear as approving slander 
of a reigning favorite. Heminges and Condell were 
men of straw, whose names are signed to the preface 
to the "first folio," who otherwise bear no testimony 
one way or the other, but whose book, as will be 
demonstrated farther on, is an unwilling witness 
against its purported author. And Ben Jonson, who 
brings up the rear of this precious seven, has been al- 
ready disposed of. That theory must be pretty soundly 
grounded in truth, against which there is nothing but 
rhetoric to hurl, and, in our opinion, it would be en- 
tirely safe — if not for the Baconians, for the anti- 
Shakespeareans, at least — to rest their case on the ar- 
guments for the other side. And we believe the more 

count of Greene's career, as connected with William Shakes- 
peare, is to be found in " The School of Shakespeare," by Rich- 
ard Simpson, London : Chatto & Windus, 1878, Vol. II., p. 339. 



PART V. — THE BACONIAN THEORY. 253 

thoughtful among Shakespeareans are beginning to 
recognize it, and coming to comprehend that, if they 
are to keep their Shakespeare they must re- write their 
" Biographies ; " spend less time in proving him to 
have been an epitome of the moral virtues — beyond 
the temptation of deer stealing, beer drinking, and 
skylarking, etc. — and devote more attention to his op- 
portunities for acquiring the lore and technical knowl- 
edge his alleged pages so accurately handle. Espe- 
cially has Mr. Halliwell Phillips, in his little book (in 
which he binds himself to cite no dates or authorities 
subsequent to 1616), 1 impressed us as endeavoring to 
meet this emergency. But we find that he has not 
met it. He has, indeed, developed many details of 
curious interest — as that John Shakespeare was, in 
April, 1552, fined twelve pence for throwing muck 
into the street in front of his house; and that he was 
several times a candidate for high bailiff' of Stratford 
(or mayor, as the office was afterward called) before 
finally arriving at that dignity in 1568 ; that July 15, 
1613, there was heard at Worcester Assizes a curious 
lawsuit, brought by Dr. John Hall, Shakespeare's son- 
in-law, against a neighbor for slandering his wife (Su- 
sannah Shakespeare), which suit appears to have been 
"fixed" in some way before coming to trial. Mr. 
Phillips brings much learning to prove that William 
may have been " pre-contracted " to Anne Hathaway — 
that his death may have been from malarial fever 

Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare. Brighton. Printed for 
the Author's friends, 1881. We should add to our list of books 
Mr. 0. Follett's two able pamphlets on the Baconian theory. 
Sandusky, Ohio, 1880. 



254 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

rather than inebriation — which have nothing at all to 
do with the question or the practical difficulties cited 
by the anti-Shakespeareans, one way or the other. 
But as to those practical difficulties, he brings no light 
and has no word to say. 



PART VI. — THE NEW THEORY. 255 



PART VI. 

THE NEW THEORY— THE SONNETS— CONCLUSION. 




F a matter so indifferent as the number of peb- 
bles in Demosthenes' mouth when he prac- 
ticed oratory on the beach, no effort of 
credulity can be predicated. But when a 
proposition is historical and capable of proving itself, 
it is, indeed, the skeptic who believes the most. It 
would be interesting, for example, to compile a cat- 
alogue of the reasons why A, B, and C, and their 
friends, doubt the real Shakespeare story, and cling to 
the manufactured tradition. A will tell us he believes 
it because somebody else (Bacon will do as well as 
anybody) wrote enough as it was, and was not the 
sort of man who would surrender any of the glory 
to which he w r as himself entitled, to another. B, be- 
cause, when somebody else wrote poetry (for example, 
Bacon's "Paraphrase of the Psalms"), his style was 
quite another than the style of the dramas. C, be- 
cause he is satisfied that William Shakespeare spent 
some terms at Stratford school, and was any thing but 
unkind to his wife. D, because the presumption is too 
old to be disturbed ; as if we should always go on be- 
lieving in William Tell and the man in the moon, 
because our ancestors believed in them ! And so on, 
through the alphabet. It is so much easier, for in- 
stance, to believe that miracles should appear by the 
page, or that universal w 7 isdom should spring fully 



256 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

armed from the brain of a Warwickshire clown, than 
that Francis Bacon, or somebody else, should write 
anonymously, or in two hands, or use as a nomme de 
plume the name of a living man, instead of inventing 
one de novo. And, had such a nomme de plume been 
wanted, whose name was more cheaply purchasable, 
and more available for incognito, than this of a theat- 
rical "Johannes Factotum," who, by doing any thing 
and every thing that was wanted, and saving every 
honest penny he turned, actually became able to buy 
himself a coat-of-arms (the first luxury he ever ap- 
pears to have allowed himself out. of his increasing 
prosperity) 1 and a county seat, and so to be, par excel- 
lence — among a then despised and low caste craft — 
" the gentle " Shakespeare ? 

In the days when this historical William Shakes- 
peare arrived in London, there were two playhouses 
in operation, to either of which he might have strolled 
on foot, without crossing the river to the Surrey shore, 
and to which gentlemen very probably rode on horse- 
back— " The Theatre" and "The Curtain" at. Shore- 
ditch. Before the door of one of these we may, perhaps, 

1 We happen on traces of the fact that William Shakespeare's 
particular weakness was his "noble descent" very often, in ex- 
ploring the annals of these times, and that his fellow actors by 
no means spared his weakness. " It was then a current joke to 
identify Shakespeare with 'the Conqueror,' or r Rufus,' as if his 
pretensions to descent from the Norman dukes were known" 
("Ben Jonson's Quarrel with Shakespeare," "North British Re- 
view," July, 1870). And certain lines in the "Poetaster" are 
supposed to be a fling at this weakness of Shakespeare, as the 
whole play is believed to be a hit at Marlow (id.). We shall see 
how this weakness was fostered by the new set into which cir- 
cumstances forced Shakespeare, later on. 



PART VI. — THE NEW THEORY. 257 

imagine a rustic lad — fresh from Stratford, and foot- 
sore from his long tramp, attracted by the crowd and 
the lights, standing idle and agape. Possibly, then, 
riding up, some gallant threw young William his 
horse's bridle, and William Shakespeare had found 
employment in London. By attention to business, 
William, in time, may have, as Eowe thinks, come 
to control the horse -holding business, and take his 
predecessors into his pay ; until they became known 
as " Shakespeare's boys," and the young specula- 
tor's name penetrated to the inside of the theater. 
In course of time he becomes a "servitour" (what 
we now call a " super," i. e., supernumerary) inside, 
and ultimately (according to Rowe, an actor him- 
self, and the nearest in point of time to William 
Shakespeare to write his biography) " the reader" * of 
the establishment ; and naturally, therefore, stage ed- 
itor of whatever is offered. He has no royal road to 
learning at his command, nor does he want one. The 
" knack at speech-making," which had delighted the 
rustic youth of Stratford, mellowed by the new expe- 
riences which surround him, is all he needs. Not 
only the plays of Greene and others, which he now 
remodeled (and improved, no doubt), but essays of his 
own, became popular. The audience (we shall see 
more of them further on) called for " Shakespeare's 
plays," and his name came to possess a market value. 
The dramas we now call " Shakespearean " surely 
did appear in his lifetime, aud under his name. Were 

*In this capacity he read and accepted Ben Jonson's "Every 
Man in his Humour," which was the beginning of the intimacy 
which ended with their lives. 

22 



258 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

they ever performed at his theater? Let us glance at 
the probabilities. 

The " theaters " of this day are barely more 
than inclosures, with a raised platform for the per- 
formers, and straw for the audience to stand or go 
to sleep in, as they prefer. Wotton, in a letter to 
Bacon, 1 says that the fire that destroyed the Globe 
theater burned up nothing but "a little wood and 
straw and a few forsaken cloaks." Sir Philip Sidney, 
writing in 1583, ridicules the poverty of the scenic ef- 
fects and properties of the day in an often-quoted 
passage: "You shall have Asia of the one side and 
Africke of the other, and so many other under king- 
domes that the plaier, when hee comes in, must ever 
begin with telling where hee is, or else the tale will 
not be conceived. Now, you shall have three ladies 
walk to gather flowers, and then you must believe the 
stage to be a garden: by-and-by we have news of a 
shipwreck in the same place; and we are to blame if 
we accept it not for a rock. Upon the back of that 
comes a hideous monster, with lire and smoke, and the 
miserable beholders are bound to take it for a cave, 
while, in the mean time, two armies fly in, represented 
with four swords and bucklers, and then what hard 
heart will not receive it for a pitched field !" 2 

And M. Taine has drawn a life-like picture of the 
audience which applauded this performance : " The 
poor could enter as well as the rich ; there were six- 
penny, twopenny, even penny seats. . . . If it 
rained, and it often rained in London, the people in 

1 Smith's " Bacon and Shakespeare," p. 74. 

2 "The Defence of Poesie," edition 1626, p. 592. 



PART VI. — THE NEW THEORY. 259 

the pit, butchers, mercers, bakers, sailors, apprentices, 
receive the streaming rain on their heads . . . 
they did not trouble themselves about it. While wait- 
ing for the pieces they . . „ drink beer, crack 
nuts, eat fruit, howl, and now and then resort to their 
fists : they have been known to fall upon the actors, 
and turn the theater upside down. At other times 
they were dissatisfied and went to the tavern to give 
the poet a hiding or toss him in a blanket. . . . 
When the beer took effect there was a great upturned 
barrel in the pit, a receptacle for general use. The 
smell arises, and then comes the cry, ' Burn the juni- 
per !' They burn some in a plate in the stage, and the 
heavy smoke fills the air. Certainly the folk there 
assembled could scarcely get disgusted at any thing, 
and can not have had sensitive noses. In the time of 
Rabelais there was not much cleanliness to speak of. 
Remember that they were hardly out of the middle 
age, and that, in the middle age, man lived on a dung- 
hill." Mr. White assures us further, that pickpockets 
were apt to be plentiful among this audience, and when 
discovered, were borne upon the stage, pilloried in full 
view, 1 and there left, the play going on meanwhile 
around them; and, moreover, that the best seats sold 
were on the stage itself; where any of the audience, who 
could pay the price, could sit, recline, walk, or con- 
verse w T ith the actors engaged in the performance," 
while pages brought them rushes to stretch upon, and 

1 " Kempe, the actor, in his 'Nine Days' Wonder,' a. d. 1600, 
compares a man to ' such an one as we tye to a poast on our stage 
for all the people to wonder at when they are taken pilfering.' " 
(" Shakespeare," by Richard Grant White, Vol. I., p. 183.) 



260 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

pipes of tobacco with which to regale themselves. 1 
"Practicable" scenery of any sort, even the rudest, 
was utterly unknown, 2 and it is thought that the act- 
ors relied on barely more than the written action of 
the piece for their guidance. In the plays of this pe- 
riod we come continually on such stage directions as 
" Here they two talke and rayle what they list;" "All 
speak ;" " Here they all talke," etc., 3 which proves that 
much of the dialogue was trusted to the inspiration of 
the moment — to which inspiration the gallants and 
pickpockets may not unnaturally have contributed. 
The principal burden of entertaining the audience 
rested with the clown, who, unembarrassed by any 



1 Ibid. 

2 Whenever we come on a stage direction, therefore, which sup- 
poses "practicable" scenery in a play, we may assert with con- 
fidence, that the same was written in or after 1662, up to which 
date there was no such thing as practicable machinery. In the 
original edition of " The Tempest," for instance, there is no in- 
timation, by way of stage direction, that the first scene occurs on 
shipboard. In the first edition of "As You Like It" there is 
no mention of a forest in the stage direction. Nor in the early 
quartos of "Romeo and Juliet" is there any intimation that Ju- 
liet makes love in a balcony. " What child is there, that, com- 
ing to a play, and seeing Thebes written in great letters upon an 
old door, doth believe that it is Thebes?" says Sidney, in his 
"Defence of Poesie."— (R. Gk White's "Shakespeare's Scholar," 
p. 489, note.) Trap-doors, however, were probably in very 
early use; at least, we find in a comedy by Middleton and Dekkar 
a character called " Trap-door." There seems, also, to have been 
pillars that turned about, and a writer in the times of James I. 
mentions that " the stage varied three times in one tragedy." 

3 These stage directions are taken from Greene's " Tu Quoque," 
a. d. 1614, two years before Shakespeare died, and long after, ac- 
cording to the commentators, he had ceased writing for the 
stage. 



PART VI. — THE NEW THEORY. 261 

reierence to the subject-matter of the play, popped in 
and out at will, cracked his jokes, danced and sung 
and made himself familiar with the outsiders upon 
the stage. Before an audience satisfied with this 
rudimentary setting, upon a stage crowded with 
smirking gallants and flirting maids of honor, we 
are assured that Hamlet and Wolsey delivered their 
soliloquies, Anthony his impassioned oratory, and 
Isabella her pious strains; while the clowns and pot- 
wrestlers discoursed among themselves of Athens and 
Troy, and Hecuba and Althea, of Galen and Paracelus, 
of "writs of detainer," and "fine and recovery," and 
" praemunire," and of the secrets of the pharmacopoeia ! 
"At this public theater," says Mr. Smith, " to which 
every one could obtain access, and the lowest of the 
people ordinarily resorted ... we are called upon 
to believe that the wonderful works which we so 
greatly admire and feel we can only appreciate by 
careful private study — that not only Englishmen like 
Coleridge confess, in forty years of admiring study of 
Greek, Latin, English, Italian, Spanish, and German 
philosophers, literature, and manners, to have found 
bursting upon him with increased power, wisdom, and 
beauty in every step," l but foreigners like Schlegel, 
Jean Paul, and Gervinus, " have fallen down before 
in all but heathen adoration" — were performed. In 
1880, when we force a common-school education at 
state expense upon the people, the Shakespearean 
plays are disastrous to managers. They "lose money 
on Shakespeare," and unless " carpentry and French " — 
unless ballet and spectacle are liberally resorted to, are 

1 Bacon and Shakespeare, p. 91. 



262 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

dragged down to desolate houses and financial ruin. 
" Shakespeare " is " over the heads " of be nbXXoe in 
these days of compulsory education. And yet we are 
calmly asked to credit the astounding statement that 
in and about the year 1600, in London, these grave, 
intellectual, and stately dialogues are taking by storm 
the rabble of the Bankside, and entrancing the trades- 
men and burghers of the days when to read was quite 
as rare an accomplishment as serpent-charming is to- 
day — when, if sovereigns wrote their own names, it 
was all they could do — and when the government 
could not afford to hang a man who could actually 
write his name. 1 "And yet," to quote Mr. Smith 
again, " it was from the profit arising from this 
wretched place of amusement that Shakespeare rea- 
lized the far from inconsiderable fortune with which 
in a few years he retired to Stratford-upon-Avon." If 
not actual intellectual giants, the rabble of that day 
must have been the superiors in literary perception of 
some very eminent gentlemen who were to come 
after them, like, for example, Fuller, Evelyn, Pepys, 
Dryden, Dennis, liymer, Hume, Pope, Addison, Steele, 
and Johnson, whose comments on our immortal drama 
we have set forth in the First Part of this work. 2 Only 
we happen to know they were not. 

As an alternative to believing that these pearls, over 
which this nineteenth century gloats, were cast before 
the swine of the sixteenth ; the theory we are now con- 



1 Benefit of clergy was only abolished in England by acts 7 and 
8, George IV., c. 28, sec. 3, in 1827, fifty-three years ago; in the 
United States it had been disposed of (though it had never been 
availed of ) by act of Congress, April 30, 1790. 

2 Ante, pp. 20-29. 



PART VI. — THE NEW THEORY. 263 

sidering offers, as less violent an attack upon common 
sense, the supposition that what we now possess un- 
der the name of " Shakespeare's plays" were not pro- 
duced upon the stage of any play-house in those 
days, but were printed instead, the name of William 
Shakespeare having been attached to them as surety 
for a certain circulation. The well-attested fact 
that William Shakespeare was a play-writer is not 
ignored by this supposition ; for the new theorists 
believe that, although no fragment of the Shakespeare 
work now survives, its character can be readily de- 
termined. From what knowledge we possess of the 
tone and quality of the audiences of those days, it is 
not difficult to imagine the rudeness and crudity of the 
plays. 

These were the formative days of audiences, and, 
therefore, the formative days of plays. Sir Henry 
Wotton, in a letter from which we have just quoted, 
written to Lord Bacon in 1613, refers to one of 
these plays called " The Hog hath lost its Pearl." 
Says this letter: "Now it is strange to hear how 
sharp-witted the city is ; for they will needs have 
Sir Thomas Swinnerton, the Lord Mayor, be meant by 
the hog, and the late Lord Treasurer by the pearl." 
There is no disputing the fact, at least, that the plays 
we call " Shakespeare's " are cast in a mold by them- 
selves, and have no contemporary exemplar. The 
student of these days knows the fact that Dekker, 
Webster, Massinger, Jonson, or any other who wrote 
in periods that are counted " literature," made no for- 
tunes at their work. That such as this one alluded to by 
Wotton — and one example will suffice — were what the 
town ran to see in those days, mere local sketches — 



264 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

lampoons on yesterday's events; coarse parables, the 
allusions in which could be met and enjoyed by the 
actors themselves (were to the popular taste, that is to 
say), is much easier to conceive than that the " Ham- 
let" and the "Lear" were to the popular taste. One 
Dr. Hey wood (who, it is to be noted, is sometimes 
called the u prose Shakespeare") is understood to have 
produced some two hundred and twenty of this sort 
of sketches alone; aud, possibly, this was the sort of 
" early essays at dramatic poetry " which Aubrey 
speaks of: this " the facetious grace in writing that ap- 
proves his wit " which Chettle assigns to William 
Shakespeare — mere sketches in silhouette of the 
town's doings, such as would appeal, as this sort still 
do in cities, to a popular and local audience. There 
is some curious testimony on the subject, which looks 
to that effect. 

Cart wright, 1 in his lines on Fletcher, says : 

" Shakespeare to thee was dull, whose best jest lies 
1' th' ladies' questions, and the fools' replies, 
Old-fashioned wit, which walked from town to town 
In turned hose, which our fathers called the clown ; 
Whose wit our nice times would obsceneness call, 
And which made bawdry pass for comical. 

• Nature was all his art : thy vein was free 
As his, but without his scurrility." 

One Leonard Digges — who, Farmer says (in his essay on 
" The Learning of Shakespeare "), was " a wit of the 
town " in the days of Shakespeare — wrote some verses 
laudatory of William Shakespeare, which (Farmer 
says again) " were printed along with a spurious edi- 

1 Poems, 1651, p. 273. 



PART VI. — THE NEW THEORY. 265 

tion of Shakespeare " in 1640. In this copy of verses 
occur such lines as — 

" Nature only led him, for look thorough 
This whole book, thou shalt find he doth not borrow 
One phrase from Greeks, nor Latins imitate, 
Nor once from vulgar languages translate." 

A startling declaration to find made, even in poetry, 
concerning compositions which Judge Holmes has 
demonstrated are crowded with classical borrowings, 
imitations drawn from works untranslated from their 
originals at the date when quoted ; so that it would be 
impossible to say that the quoter found them in English 
works and took them with no knowledge of their orig- 
inal source ! l " Nature itself was all his art," says Ful- 
ler, and Denham, again, asserts that "all he [Shakes- 
peare] has was from old mother witt." 2 And Dominie 
Ward says, to the same effect, in his diary, " I have 
heard that Mr. Shakespeare was a natural witt, with- 
out any art at all;" 3 though, of course, this was, and 
could have been, nothing more than matter of report. 
It is probable that, in the production of these plays, 
William Shakespeare was not always scrupulous to 
compose " without blotting out a line" himself. That 
he was a reckless borrower, and scissored unconscion- 
ably from Robert Greene and others (so much so that 

1 See Holmes's "Authorship of Shakespeare," third edition, 
p. 5. 

2 Farmer, p. 13. 

V Diary of Kev. John Ward, Vicar of Stratford, extending 
from 1648 to 1679," p. 183; London, 1839, p. 30. 

Shakespeare took his "Taming of the Shrew" from Greene's 
" Taming of A Shrew," there being no copyright to prevent. 
23 



266 TIIE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

Greene wrote a whole book in protest), we have 
Greene's book itself to testify. From its almost 
unintelligible pages Ave can glean some idea of the 
turgid English of the day. It was, of course, in 
the composition of this popular English that Shakes- 
peare, by surpassing Greene, awakened the latter's 
jealousy. Otherwise, there would have been no su- 
periority in Shakespeare over Greene which Greene 
could have perceived: or, at least, no cutting into 
Greene's profits wherein Greene could have found 
cause for jealousy. For, if Greene had continued to 
earn money indifferently to whether Shakespeare car- 
ried on his trade or not, he would not have been 
" jealous." But so fluent and clever a fellow as this 
William Shakespeare of Stratford, who could hold, 
when a mere boy, his rustic audience with a speech 
over a calf-sticking, was a dangerous rival among the 
hackney stock-playwrights of London, and would 
easily have made himself invaluable to his manage- 
ment by dashing off scores of such local sketches as 
" The Hog hath lost his Pearl/' suggested by the cur- 
rent events of the day. 

But, even if " Hamlet," " Othello," " King Lear," 
•'Macbeth," and "Julius Csesar" could have been 
produced by machinery, and engrossed currente calamo, 
(so that the author's first draft should be the acting 
copy for the players), they could have hardly been 
composed, nowadays, without a library. And even 
had William Shakespeare possessed an encyclopaedia 
(such as were first invented two hundred years or so 
after his funeral) he would not have found it inclusive 
of all the reference he needed for those five plays alone. 
They can not be studied as they are capable of being 



PART VI. — THE NEW THEORY. 267 

studied — as they were found capable of being studied 
by Coleridge and Gervinus — without a library. And 
yet are we to be asked to believe they were composed 
without one ? — in the days when such a thing as a dic- 
tionary even was unknown ! Who ever heard of 
William Shakespeare in his library, pulling down vol- 
umes, dipping into folios, peering into manuscripts, his 
brain in throe and his pen in labor, weaving the warp 
and woof of his poetry and his philosophy, at the ex- 
pense of Greece and Rome and Egypt; pillaging alike 
from tomes of Norseman lore and Southern romance — 
for the pastime of the rabble that sang bawdy songs 
and swallowed beer amid the straw of his pit, 
and burned juniper and tossed his journey-actors in 
blankets ? 

It is always interesting to read of the habitudes 
of authors — of paper-saving Pope scribbling his 
" Iliad " on the backs of old correspondence, of Spen- 
ser by his fireside in his library at Kilcolman Castle, 
of Scott among his dogs, of Gibbon biting at the 
peaches that hung on the trees in his garden at Lau- 
sanne, of Schiller declaiming by mountain brook- 
sides and in forest paths, of Goldsmith in his garrets 
and his jails. Even of Chaucer, dead and buried be- 
fore Shakespeare saw the light, we read of his studies 
at Cambridge, his call to the bar, and his chambers in 
the Middle Temple. But of William Shakespeare — 
after ransacking tradition, gossip, and the record — 
save and except the statement of Ben Jonson how he 
had heard the actor's anecdote about his never blotting 
his lines — not a word, not a breath, can be found to 
connect him w T ith, or surprise him in any agency or 
employment as to the composition of the plays we 



268 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

insist upon calling his — much less to the possession of 
a single hook! Did "William Shakespeare own a li- 
brary ? Had we found this massive draught upon an- 
tiquity in the remains of an immortal Milton or a 
mortal Tupper, or in all the range of letters between, 
we should not have failed to presume a library. Why 
should we believe that William Shakespeare needed 
none? — that, as his pen ran, he never paused to lift 
volume from the shelf to refresh or verify his marvel- 
ously retentive recollection ? There was no Astor or 
Mercantile Library around the corner from the Globe 
or the Blackfriars, in those days. And, as for his own 
possessions, he leaves in his Will no hint of book or 
library, much less of the literature the booksellers had 
taken the liberty of christening with his name ! Where 
is the scholar who glories not in his scholarship ? By 
universal testimony, the highest pleasure which an au- 
thor draws from his own completed work, the pride 
of the poet in his own poem, is their chiefest payment. 
The simple fact — which stands out so prominently in 
the life of this man that nobody can gainsay it — that 
William Shakespeare took neither pride nor pleasure 
in any of the works which passed current with the 
rest of the world as his, might well make the most 
casual student of those days suspicious of a claim that, 
among his other accomplishments, William Shakes- 
peare was an author at all. 

Just here we are referred to a passage in Fuller's 
" Worthies :" " Many were the wit combats," says 
Fuller, u between Shakespeare and Ben Jonson ; . . . 
I beheld them," etc. But Fuller was only eight years 
old when Shakespeare died, and possibly spoke from 
hearsay, as it is hardly probable that an infant of such 



PART VI. — THE NEW THEORY. 269 

tender years was permitted to spend his nights in 
"The Mermaid." Besides, these "wit combats" at 
"The Mermaid" are now said to be "wet combats," 
i. e. drinking-bouts, by a long-adopted misprint. 

As a matter of fact, unless we are misled by a typo- 
graphical error in the edition before us, 1 what Fuller 

1 The History of the Worthies of England. Endeavored by 
Thomas Fuller, D.D. Two volumes. (First printed in 1662.) A 
new edition, with a few Explanatory Notes by John Nichols, 
F. A. S. London, Edinburgh, and Perth. Printed for F. C. & J. 
Rivington and others. The reference to William Shakespeare 
is at page 414 of volume II., and is as follows: 

" WARWICKSHIRE 

" WRITERS SINCE THE REFORMATION. 

"William Shakespeare was born at Stratford-on-Avon, in this 
county, in whom three eminent Poets may seem in some sort to 
be compounded. 1. Martial in the warlike sound of his surname 
(whence some may conjecture him of a military extraction), Hasti- 
vibrans or Shake-speare. 2. Ovid, the most naturall and witty of 
Poets; and hence it was that Queen Elizabeth, coming into a 
grammar school, made this extemporary verse — 

" Persius a Crab-Staffe, Bawdy Martial, Ovid a fine Wag. 

" 3. Plautus who was an exact Commedian, yet never any 
Scholar, as one Shakespeare (if alive) would confess himself. 
Adde to all these that, though his genius generally was jocular, 
and inclining him to festivity, yet he could (when so disposed) be 
solemn and serious, as appears by his Tragedies ; so that Heraclitus 
himself (I mean if secret and unseen) might afford to smile at 
his Comedies, they were so merry ; and Democritus scarce forbear 
to sigh at his tragedies, they were so mournfull. 

" He was an eminent instance of the truth of that Rule, Poeta 
non fit sed nascitur, ; One is not made but born a poet.' In- 
deed, his learning was very little, so that as Cornish diamonds 
are not polished by any lapidary, but are pointed and smoothed 
even as they are taken out of the earth, so nature itself was all 
the Art which was used upon him. Many were the ivet-combates 



270 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

did actually say was, not " wit combats/' but " wet 
combats." But even if they were " wit combats," and 
not friendly contests at ale-guzzling, like the early 
tournament at "Piping Pebworth" and "Drunken 
Bidford," the " wit " could not have been colossal, if 
we may judge from one example preserved in the Ash- 
molean manuscripts at Oxford, as stated by Capell. 
" Ben " (Jonson) and " Bill " (Shakespeare) propose a 
joint epitaph. 

Ben begins : 

" Here lies Ben Jonson, 
Who was once one — " 

Shakespeare concludes : 

" That while he lived, was a slow thing, 
And now, being dead, is no-thing." 

This being the sort of literature which William 
Shakespeare's pen turned out during his residence in 
London, he could manage very well without a library. 
And it was the most natural thing in the world that, 
after retiring to the shade of Stratford, it should have 
produced, on occasion, the famous epitaphs on his 
friends Elias James aud " Thinbeard." At all events, 
this is a simpler explanation than the " deterioration of 
power, for which no .one has assigned a sufficient rea- 
son," which Halliwell x was driven to assume in order 

betwixt him and Ben Jonson ; which two I beheld like a Spanish 
great gallion and an English man of war, lesser in bulk but lighter 
in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about and take advan- 
tage of all winds, by the quickness of his wit and invention. He 
died Anno Domini . . . and was buried at Stratford-upon- 
Avon, the town of his nativity." 

1 " Life of Shakespeare," p. 270. London, 1848. 



PART VI. — THE NEW THEORY. 271 

to account for this drivel from the pen which had 
written " Hamlet.' And, moreover, it is a satisfactory 
explanation of what can not be explained in any other 
way (and which no Shakespearean has ever yet at- 
tempted to explain at all), of the fact that William 
Shakespeare, making his last Will and Testament at 
Stratford, in 1515, utterly ignored the existence of any 
literary property among his assets, or of his having 
used his pen, at any period, in accumulating the com- 
petency of which he died possessed. Had William 
Shakespeare been the courtly favorite of two sover- 
eigns (which Mr. Hallam doubts 1 ), it is curious that he 
never was selected to write a Masqne. Masques were 
the standard holiday diversions of the nobles of the 
day, to which royalty was so devoted that it is said 
the famous Inigo Jones was maintained for some years 
in the employment of devising the trappings for them 
alone (though, of course, it is no evidence, either way, 
as to the matter we have in hand). But if William 
Shakespeare was the shrewd and prosperous trades- 
man that we have record of (and, that he came to Lon- 
don poor and left it rich, everybody knows), was he 
not shrewd enough, as well, to see that his audiences 
did not require philosophical essays and historical 
treatises; that he need not waste his midnight oil to 
verify the customs of the early Cyprians, or pause to 
explore for them the secrets of nature? We may as- 
sert him to be a " great moral teacher " to-day ; but, 
had he been a "great moral teacher" then, he would 
have set his stage to empty houses. He could have 
earned the same money with much less trouble to 

1 Literature of Europe," vol. iii., p. 77 (note). 



272 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

himself. The gallants would have resorted to his stage 
daily (as they would have gone to the baths if they 
had been in old Rome) ; and the ha'penny seats have 
enjoyed themselves quite as much had he given them 
the school of " The Hog hath lost his Pearl," or 
"The Devil is an Ass," or the tumbles of a clown. 
Why should this thrifty manager have ransacked 
Greek and Latin and Italian letters, the romance of 
Italy and the Sagas of the North (or, according to Dr. 
Farmer, rummaged the cloisters of all England, to get 
these at second hand) ? Had these all been collected 
in a public library, would he have had leisure to sit 
down and pull them over for this precious, audience of 
his, these gallants and groundlings — when his money 
was quite as safe if he merely reached out and took 
the nearest spectacle at hand (as he took his " Taming 
of the Shrew," "Winter's Tale," "sea-coast of Bo- 
hemia," and all — from Robert Greene) ? But, if we may 
be allowed tc conceive that it was the action (that is to 
say, the "business") of the Shakespearean plays that 
delighted this Shakespearean audience (that filled the 
cockpit, galleries, and boxes, while poor Ben Jonson's, 
according to Digges, would hardly bring money enough 
to pay for a sea-coal fire), and that certain greater than 
the manager used this action thereafter as a dress for 
the mighty transcripts caused to be printed under 
voucher of the popular manager's name — if we may 
be allowed to conceive this — however exceptional, it is 
at least an accounting for the Shakespearean plays as 
we possess them to-day, without doing violence to 
human experience and the laws of nature. 

Southampton, Raleigh, Essex, Rutland, and Mont- 
gomery are young noblemen of wealth and leisure, 



PART VI. — THE NEW THEORY. 273 

who "pass away the time merely in going to plays 
every clay/' 1 We have seen that the best seats were 
on the stage, and these, of course, the young noble- 
men occupied. There were no actresses in those days — 
the female parts were taken by boys — but titled ladies 
and maids of honor were admitted to seats on the 
stage as well as the gallants, and a thrifty stage man- 
ager might easily make himself useful to both. If my 
Lord Southampton was bosom friend to William 
Shakespeare (as rumor has it), their intimacy arose 
probably through some such service. A noble youth 
of nineteen, of proverbial gallantry and sufficient 
wealth (though, it must be remembered, as among the 
fortunes of his day, a comparatively poor man ; not 
able to give away $25,000 at a time, for instance), was 
not at so great a loss for a friend and alter ego in Lon- 
don in 1593 (the date at which the " Venus and Adonis " 
is dedicated to him) as to be forced to forget the social 
gulf that separated him from an economical commoner 
(lately a butcher in the provinces), however popular a 
stage manager, except for cause; and it takes consid- 
erable credulity to believe that he did forget it (if he 
did), through being dazzled by the transcendent liter- 
ary abilities of the economical commoner aforesaid. 
For Southampton lived and died without ever being 
suspected of a devotion to literature or literary pur- 

1 " My Lord Southampton and Lord Rutland come not to the 
court, the one but very seldom ; they pass away the time merely 
in going to plays every day." — (Letter from Rowland White to 
Sir Robert Sidney, dated October 11, 1599, quoted by Kenny, 
"Life and Genius of Shakespeare." London: Longmans, 1864, 
p. 34, note.) But it may be noted that Southampton and Ra- 
leigh were opposed to each other in politics. 



274 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

suits ; and, besides, the economical commoner had not 
then written (if he ever did write) the " Hamlet" and 
"Lear," and those other evidences of the transcendent 
literary ability which could sednce a peer outside his 
caste. That the gallants and stage managers of the 
day understood each other, just as they perhaps do to- 
day, there is reason to believe. Dekker, in his " Gull's 
Horn-Book," says that, " after the play was over, po- 
ets adjourned to supper with knights, where they in 
private unfolded the secret parts of their dramas to 
them." By "poets" in this extract is meant, as ap- 
pears from the context, the writers of dramas for the 
stage; such as, perhaps, William Shakespeare was. 
But whether these suppers after the play were devoted 
to intellectual and philosophical criticism is a question 
for each one's experience to aid him in answering. 
Whether William Shakespeare was admitted to this 
noble companionship, or was only emulous of the 
honor, we have no means of conjecture, as either might 
account for the fact that with his first savings he pur- 
chased a grant of arms for his father, thus obtaining 
not only an escutcheon, but one whole generation of 
ancestry; a transaction which involved, says Dr. 
Farmer, the falsehood and venality of the father, the 
son and two kings at arms, and did not escape pro- 
test; 1 for if ever a coat was "cut from whole cloth," 
we may be sure that this coat-of-arms was the one. 

1 A complaint must have been made from some quarter that 
this application had no sufficient foundation, for we have, in the 
Herald's college, a manuscript which purports to be " the answer 
of Garter and Clarencieux, kings of arms, to a libellous scrowl 
against certain arms supposed to be wrongfully given;" in which 
the writers state, under the head " Shakespeare," that " the per- 



PART VI. — THE NEW THEORY. 275 

Whoever wrote Hamlet's soliloquy and Antony's 
oration might well have wri'ten the "Venus and 
Adonis" and the " Lucrece," and was quite equal to 
the bold stroke of describi ng the former (the most splen- 
didly sensuous poem in an} 7 language— a poem that 

son to whom it was granted had borne magistracy, and was jus- 
tice of peace, at Stratford-upon-Avon ; he married the daughter 
and heir of Arden, and was able to maintain that estate." The 
whole of this transaction is involved in considerable, and, per- 
haps, to a great extent, intentional obscurity; and it still seems 
doubtful whether any grant was actually made in the year 1596. 
In the year 1599, the application must have been renewed in a 
somewhat altered form. Under that date, there exists a draft of 
another grant, by which John Shakespeare was further to be al- 
lowed to impale the ancient arms of Arden. In this document 
a statement was originally inserted to the effect that "John 
Shakespeare showed and produced his ancient coat-of-arms, here- 
tofore assigned to him whilst he was her Majesty's officer and 
bailiff of that town." But the words "showed and produced" 
were afterward erased, and in this unsatisfactory manner the 
matter appears to have terminated. 

It is manifest that the entries we have quoted contain a num- 
ber of exaggerations, one even of positive misstatements. The 
"parents and antecessors" of John Shakespeare were not ad- 
vanced and rewarded by Henry VII. ; but the maternal ances- 
tors, or, more probably, some more distant relatives of William 
Shakespeare, appear to have received some favors and distinc- 
tions from that sovereign. The pattern of arms given, as it is 
stated, under the hand of Clarencieux (Cooke, who was then 
dead), is not found in his records, and we can place no faith in 
his allegation. John Shakespeare had been a justice of the 
peace, merely ex officio, and not by commission, as is here insin- 
uated; in all probability he did not possess "lands and tene- 
ments of the value of five hundred pounds ;" and Robert Arden, 
of Wilmecote, was not a "gentleman of worship." — (Kenny, 
" Life and Genius of Shakespeare," p. 38. London: Longmans, 
1854.) 



276 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

breathes in every line the blase and salacious exquisite), 
as the first heir of the invention of a busy London 
manager and whilom rustic Lothario among War- 
wickshire milkmaids. The question as to the author- 
ship of the one hundred and fifty-four " Sonnets," 
which appeared (with the exception of two, printed 
in 1598, in a collection of verses called for some un- 
suggested reason "The Passionate Pilgrim") in 1609, 
need not enter into any anti-Shakespearean theory at 
all. Except that one Francis Meres, writing in 1598 
— eleven years before — had reported William Shakes- 
peare to have circulated certain "sugared sonnets 
among his private friends;" 1 and that the one hundred 
and thirty -six f, h oft' e series says the author's name is 
" Will " (the common nickname of a poet of those days), 2 
there is nothing to connect them with William Shakes- 
peare except his name on the title-page — in the days 
when w r e have seen that printers put whatever name they 
pleased or thought most vendable, upon a title-page. 
(When the aforesaid " Passionate Pilgrim " was printed 
in 1598 — also as by William Shakespeare — Dr. Hey- 
wood recognized two of his own compositions incor- 
porated in it, and promptly claimed them. " No evi- 
dence," says Mr. Grant White, 3 in commenting on this 
performance, " of any public denial on Shakespeare's 
part is known to exist. It was not until the publica- 
tion of the third edition of the poem, in 1612, that 
William Shakespeare's name was removed.") But 
what involves the authorship of the sonnets in still 

1 Hallam does not think these are the sonnets mentioned by 
Meres. — (" Literature of Europe," vol. hi., p. 40, note.) 

2 See ante, p. 147, note. 

3 " Shakespeare's Works," vol. hi., p. 77. 



PART VI. — THE NEW THEORY. 277 

deeper obscurity is the fact that their publisher, 
Thomas Thorpe, himself dedicates them to a friend 
of his own. He addresses his friend as " Mr. W. II. ," 
and signs the dedication with his own inititials " T. T." 
Perhaps it was just as the name "Shakespeare" was 
fastened to the title-page of " The Passionate Pilgrim," 
and the plays to which, as we shall notice the 
Shakespeareans declare it never belonged, that Mr. 
Thomas Thorpe calls, his book "Shakespeare's Son- 
nets, never before imprinted," and makes in the pages 
of the Stationers' Company the entry : " 20 May, 1609. 
Tho. Thorpe. A book called Shake- speare's Sonnets." 
They appear conjointly with a long poem entitled "A 
Lover's Complaint," and two of them (as we have 
said) had already been printed in " The Passionate 
Pilgrim," published by Jaggard in 1598. This un- 
happy dedication has been so twisted by the commen- 
tators to serve their turns, that the only safety is to 
print it as it stood in this first edition : 

" TO . THE . ONLIE . BEGETTER . OF . 

THESE . INSUING . SONNETS . 

MR . W . H . ALL . HAPPINESSE . 

AND . THAT . ETERNETIE . 

PROMISED . 

BY . 

OUR . EVER . LIVING . POET . 

WISHETH . 

THE . WELL-WISHING . 

ADVENTURER . IN . 

SETTING 

FORTH . T . T ." 



278 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

For a dedication composed in the turgid fashion of 
nearly three hundred years ago, the above would seem 
to be peculiarly intelligible. All publications were 
ventures in those days. The printer might get his 
money back and he might not. But, until he did, he 
was an adventurer. So Mr. Thorpe, ya. setting forth 
on his adventure, wishes well to his publication and 
to some unknown patron whom he desires — as was 
the custom — to compliment with wishes of long life 
and happiness. At least this would seem to be the 
reading on the face of it. To be sure, there is a slight 
uncertainty as to whether " Mr. W. H." is dedicator 
or dedicatee. But the moment the name of Shakes- 
peare appears this little trouble becomes insignificant 
— and, as usual, difficulties begin to crowd and multiply. 

The title reads : " Shake-speares Sonnets never be- 
fore imprinted : at London, by G. Eld, for T. T. And 
are to be sold by William Apsley. 1609." 

At that name the commentators appear, and swarm 
like eagles around a carcass. 

Mr. Armitage Brown, who flourished in or about 
the year 1838, and appears to have been the first gen- 
tleman who ever took the trouble to read them, has 
demonstrated 1 that these sonnets are actually six 
poems of different lengths 2 — each poem having a con- 
sistent theme and argument (and he made this discov- 
ery by the simple process of reading them). Can any 
body believe that, if these six poems had been the 
work of the mighty Shakespeare of the Shakespear- 

1 " Shakespeare's Autographical Poems, being his Sonnets 
clearly developed," etc. By Charles Armitage Brown. London: 
James Bohn, 1838. 

2 We find, however, that Coleridge had earlier advanced the 
same theory. — Table Talk (Routledge's edition), p. 2071. 



PART VI. — THE NEW THEORY. 279 

eans, they would have waited until 1838 without a 
reader ? And, most wonderful of all, that this mighty 
poet in his own lifetime would allow six of his poems 
to be torn up into isolated stanzas by a printer, stirred 
together and run into type hap-hazard, and sold as his 
" Sonnets ?" The Sbakespeareans tell us sometimes of 
their William's utter indifference to fame, but they 
have never claimed for him an imperturbability quite 
so stolid as this. And while we could not well im- 
agine Mr. Tennyson regarding with complaisance a 
publisher who would print his " Maud," " Locksley 
Hall," " Lady Clara," etc., each verse standing by itself, 
and calling the whole " Mr. Tennyson's Sonnets," so 
we fancy even Mr. Shakespeare of the Globe, had he 
been their author, would have thought the printers 
were going a little too far. 

But, all the same, the Shakespeareans, Mr.Armitage 
Brown among the rest, are determined that these son- 
nets shall be Shakespeare's and nobody else's, and 
proceed to tell us who " Mr. W. H." (to whom Mr. 
Thorpe, at William Shakespeare's request — as if the 
the man who wrote the sonnets could not write a 
dedication of them — dedicated them) is. Certain of 
them believe the letters " W. H." to be a transposition 
of " H. W.," in which case they might stand for 
"Henry Wriothesley," Earl of Southampton. Mr. 
Boaden and two Mr. Browns 1 read them, as they stand, 
to mean William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke (in either 
case accounting for William Shakespeare addressing 
an earl as " Mr." — which may mean " Mister' or " Mas- 

1 Shakespeare's Autographical Poems." By Charles Armitage 
Brown. London, 1838. " The Sonnets of Shakespeare solved," 
etc. By Henry Brown. London, 1870. 



280 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

ter " — on the score of earl and commoner having 
been the closest of " chums "). A learned French- 
man, M. Chasles, has conjectured that Thomas Thorpe 
wrote the first half of the dedication, including the 
" Mr. W. H.," and William Shakespeare the second 
half (including, perhaps, though M. Chasles does not 
say so, the " T. T.") One equally learned German 
(Herr Bernsclorff) suggests that "W. H." means 
" William Himself," and that the great Shakespeare 
meant to dedicate these poems to his own personality 
(as George Wither, in 1611, dedicated his satirical 
poems, " G. W. wisheth himself all happiness;") and 
another supposes Shakespeare to have been in love 
with a negress, " black but comely," like the lady of 
the Canticles. Yet another, that this dark lady typi- 
fied " Dramatic art," the Roman Catholic church, etc., 
etc. Mr. Dowden will have it that Shakespeare and 
Spenser, and Minto that Shakespeare and Chapman 
were rivals for the lady's favor. And there have been 
other and even more puerile speculations put gravely 
forth by these same learned and venerable commenta- 
tors : such as, since the word " Hewes " (in the line, "A 
man in Hewes all Hewes in his controlling"), is spelled 
with a capital letter, that, therefore, " W. H." is Wil- 
liam Hewes (whoever he might have been). Wads- 
worth believes that these sonnets were the repository 
of the real emotions of William Shakespeare, as a 
relief to long simulation of other people's emotions 
in his dramas ; while Mr. William Thompson 1 believes 
them to be The Sonnett, which Bacon mentions writ- 

1 The Eenascence Drama, or History made Visible. By "Wil- 
liam Thompson, F. K. C. S., F. L. S. Melbourne: Sands & Mc- 
Dougal, Collins street, West, 1880, p. 113, et seq. 



PART VI. — THE NEW THEORY. 281 

ing in or about 1598, saying: "It happened a little 
before that time that her Majesty had a purpose to 
dine at Twickenham Park, at which time I had 
(though I profess not to be a poet) prepared a sonnet, 
directly tending and alluding to draw on her Majesty's 
reconcilement to my lord, which I remember I also 
showed to a great person," etc. Now, Mr. Thompson 
believes that this " great person " was William Her- 
bert, who read them among the friends of the putative 
author — was, in short, the " W. H." Mr. Thompson 
points out that, if these sonnets are not Bacon's Son- 
net, the latter has never been found, among Bacon's 
papers or elsewhere. 

If these are the sonnets distributed by William 
Shakespeare among his private friends — of which 
Meres seems to have known in 1598 — there would be 
this historical difficulty in connecting them with Lord 
Herbert, afterwards Earl of Pembroke, viz : In the 
Sydney Papers 1 is preserved a letter from Rowland 
White to Sir Robert Sydney, in which the writer 
says : " My Lord Herbert hath, with much ado, brought 
his father to consent that he may live at London, but 
not before the next spring." This letter is dated April 
19, 1597. " The next spring " would be 1598, the very 
year in which Meres speaks of these sonnets as in ex- 
istence among William Shakespeare's friends. Of 
course, they might have been afterwards collected and 
dedicated by their author. But at the time they were 
so collected, Lord Herbert was Earl Pembroke, and 
was surely not then, if he had ever been (which he had 

1 Vol. II., p. 43. 
24 



282 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

not), plain " Mr. W. H." In other words, if the son- 
nets were William Shakespeare's, he must either have 
dedicated them to a stranger — a boy at Oxford — or 
have waited until that boy had become of age and an 
earl, and then dedicated them to him: in either case 
by a title not his own. In the absence of explanation, 
nowadays, we would be obliged to regard such a ded- 
ication an insult rather than a compliment. And men 
were at least no less punctilious about titles in the age 
of Elizabeth than they are to-day. 

It is interesting, in this connection, to note that in 
1595, and while young Lord Herbert was at Oxford, a 
play, " Edward III.," was entered in the register of 
the Stationers' Company. In both this play and in 
Sonnett XCIY. occur the line, 

" Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds." 

Were there any means of ascertaining in which the 
line is original and in which quotation, it might be of 
aid in solving this question of authorship. But, un- 
happily, none are at hand. 

Mr. Niel believes that " W. H." means " William 
Hathaway," Shakespeare's brother-in-law, and that 
" onlie begetter" of these sonnets means " only collec- 
tor;" (going into considerable philology to make good 
his assertion), and that Hathaway collected his broth- 
er-in-law's manuscripts and carried them to Thorpe. 
Mr. Massey has, for his part, constructed a tremendous 
romance out of the sonnets, 1 in which " W. H." means 

1 Shakespeare's Sonnets, never before interpreted. London, 
1866. Vide, a volume " Remarks on the Sonnets of Shakespeare, 
showing that they belong to the Hermetic class of writings, and 
explaining their general meaning and purpose." New York: 



PART VI. — THE NEW THEORY. 283 

William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke. But all these 
commentators alike agree to ignore the fact that Wil- 
liam Shakespeare did not dedicate the sonnets to any 
body, or, so far as we know, procure Thomas Thorpe 
to do so for him. A poem, " The Phoenix and the 
Turtle," is sometimes bound up with these, described 
as " Verses among the Additional Poems to Love's 
Martyr ; or, Rosalin's Complaint," printed in 1601, but 
nobody knows by what authority, except that pub- 
lishers have got into the habit of doing so. 

Then, again, anonymous authorship was a fashion- 
able pastime among the gallants and the gentle of 
this Elizabethan day, and joint authorship a familiar 
feature in Elizabethan letters. It is said that the great 
dramas we call Shakespeare's so persistently nowadays, 
and which began to appear unheralded at about this 
time, bear internal traces of courtly and aristocratic 
authorship. The diction is stately and sedate. 'No 
peasant-born author could have assumed and sus- 
tained so haughty a contempt for every thing below 
a baronet (for only at least that grade of humanity — 
it is said by those who have carefully examined the 
drama in this view 1 — does any virtuous or praiseworthy 
attribute appear in a Shakespearean character: while 
every thing below is exceedingly comic and irre- 
sistible, but still " base, common, and popular"). If 
certain noblemen of the court proposed amusing them- 
selves at joint anonymous authorship, they were cer- 
tainly right in concluding that the name of a living 

James Miller, 1866. Printed "Anonymous," but written by 
Judge E. A. Hitchcock. 

1 Mr. Wilkes' Shakespeare from an American Point of View. 
New York: Appletons, 1876. 



284 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

man, in their own pay, was a safer disguise than a 
pseudonym which would challenge curiosity and spec- 
ulation. At least — so say the New Theorists — such 
has turned out to he the actual fact. It is the New 
Theory that, while in employment in the theater, 
William Shakespeare was approached by certain gen- 
tlemen of the court. Perhaps their names were South- 
ampton, Raleigh, Essex, Rutland, and Montgomery, 
and possibly among them was a needy and ambitious 
scholar named Bacon, who, with an eye to preferment, 
maintained their society by secret recourse to the Jews 
or to any thing that would put gold for the day in 
his purse. Possibly they desired to be unknown, for 
the reasons given by Miss Bacon. In what they asked 
of him, and what he did for them, he found, at any 
rate, his profit. The story goes that the amount 
of profit he realized from one of these gentlemen alone 
was no less a sum than a thousand pounds. If so — 
considering the buying power of pounds in those 
days — it is not so wonderful that, at this rate, 
William Shakespeare retired with a fortune. Even 
at its most and its best, it is an infinitely small 
percentum of the world's wealth that finds its 
way into the poet's pocket; poetasters are some- 
times luckier than poets. That William Shakes- 
peare's fortune came faster than the fortune of his 
fellows we do know. This was at once the most se- 
cure and the most lucrative use he could have made 
of his name. For, as we have seen, owing to the condi- 
tion of the common law, while he could hardly have 
protected himself against any piracy of his name by 
injunction, he might have loaned it for value to the 
printers, or to any one desirous of employing it, the 



PART VI. — THE NEW THEORY. 285 

risk of piracy to be the borrower's. If these noble gen- 
tlemen desired to write political philosophy — as Miss 
Bacon believed, or belles lettres for their own pleas- 
ure — they had their opportunity now; and the new 
theory is not inconsistent, either with the Delia Bacon 
theory or with the Baconian theory proper, as elabo- 
rated by Judge Holmes, who recognizes Bacon's pen 
so constantly throughout the dramas. The same dif- 
ficulties which those theories meet would still confront 
us if, as Mr. Boucicault and others have suggested, the 
plays were offered from lesser sources, and rewritten 
entirely by William Shakespeare ; for we should still 
be obliged to ask, How did he dare to retain in the 
plays the material which, unintelligible to him, he 
must have believed to be unintelligible to his audi- 
ences, as calculated to drive them away, rather than 
to attract them ? 

Any one of these schemes of assimilated author- 
ship seems at least to tally with the evidence from 
what we know as the "doubtful plays." In 1609, 
there appeared in London an anonymous publica- 
tion — a play entitled " Troilus and Cressida." It 
was accompanied by a preface addressed, "A never 
writer to an ever reader/' which, in the turgid fashion 
of the day, set forth the merit and attractions of the 
play itself. Among its other claims to public favor, 
this preface asserted the play to be one "never stal'd 
with the stage, never claperclawed with the palms of 
the vulgar" — which seems (in English) to mean that 
it had never been performed in a theater. But, how- 
ever virgin on its appearance in print, it seems to 
have very shortly become "staled with the stage," or, 
at any rate, with a stage name, for, a few months later, 



286 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

a second edition of the play (printed from the same 
type) appears, minus the preface, but with the an- 
nouncement on the title-page that this is the play of 
" Troilus aud Cressida, as it was enacted by the King's 
Majesty his servants at the Globe. Written by William 
Shakespeare" 1 Now, unless we can imagine William 
Shakespeare — while operating his theater — writing a 
play to be 'published in print — and announcing it as en- 
titled to public favor on the ground that it had never 
been polluted by contact with so unclean and unhoty 
a place as a theater, it is hard to escape the conviction 
that he was not the "never writer" — in other words, 
that he was not its author at all — but on its appear- 
ance in print, levied on it for his stage, underlined it, 
produced it, and — it proving a success — either himself 
announced it, or winked at its announcement by others, 
as a work of his own. 

Again, in 1600, a play was printed in London enti- 
tled " Sir John Oldcastle ;" in 1605, one entitled " The 
London Prodigal ;" in 1608, one entitled " The York- 
shire Tragedy ;" in 1609, one entitled " Pericles, Prince 
of Tyre;" and, at about the same time, certain others, 
viz: " The Arraignment of Paris;" "Arden of Fever- 
sham" (a very able work, by the way); "Edward 
III. ;" " The Birth of Merlin ;" " Fair Em, the Miller's 
Daughter;" "Mucedorus;" " The Merry Devil of Ed- 
monton ;*' "The Comedy of George a Green;" and 
"The Two Noble Kinsmen." All the above pur- 
ported, and were understood to be, and were sold as 
being, works of William Shakespeare, except " The 
Merry Devil of Edmonton," which was announced as 

1 Holmes's "Authorship of Shakespeare," third edition, pp. 
144-147. 



PART VI. — THE NEW THEORY. 287 

by Shakespeare and Kowley, and "The Two Noble 
Kinsmen," as by Shakespeare and Fletcher. Now, it 
is certainly a fact that William Shakespeare, from his 
box-office at the Globe, or from his country-seat at Strat- 
ford, never corroborated the printers by admitting,or 
contradicted them by denying his authorship of any of 
the above enumerated plays. The " Hamlet" had been 
previously published in or about 1603, and the "Lu- 
crece" had made its appearance in 1594. It is cer- 
tainly a fact that none of these — from "Hamlet" to 
"Fair Em," from "Lucrece" to "The Merry Devil of 
Edmonton " — did William Shakespeare ever either 
deny or claim as progeny of his. He fathered them 
all as they came, " and no questions asked." And, had 
Mr. Ireland been on hand with his " Vortigern," it 
might have gone in with the rest, with no risk of the 
scrutiny and the scholarship which exploded it so 
disastrously in 1796. No plays, bearing the name 
of William Shakespeare on their title-page, now ap- 
peared from 1609 to 1622. But in the year 1623, seven 
years after William Shakespeare's death, a folio of 
thirty-six plays is brought out by Heminges and 
Condell, entitled " The Works of Mr. William Shakes- 
peare." Of the many plays which had appeared dur- 
ing his life, and been circulated and considered as his, 
or of which mention can (according to the Shakes- 
peareans) be anywhere found, only twenty-six ap- 
peared in this folio, while ten plays are included which 
never appear to have been seen or heard of until their 
presence in this Heminges and Condell collection. 
The Shakespeareans allow that this is " mysterious," 
but precisely the same "mystery" would have been 
discovered in the days of Heminges and Condell them- 



288 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

selves, if it had been worth the while of anybody then 
living to look into the question. Nothing has hap- 
pened, since the death of William Shakespeare, to 
make the Shakespeare question any more " mysteri- 
ous " than he left it himself. 

To make this apparent at a glance, let us present 
the whole in a tabulated statement, only asking the 
reader to observe that we have in every case given the 
Shakespeareans the benefit of the doubt, and accepted 
the mention of a similar name of any play as proof 
positive of its being the play nowadays attributed to 
William Shakespeare ; and their own chronology 
everywhere. 

The following table shows the plays passing as Wil- 
liam Shakespeare's, in London, in the years when he 
resided in London, as part proprietor and concerned 
in the management of the Globe and Blackfriars 
Theaters; the dates of their earliest mention or ap- 
pearance, and which of them were included in the 
first folio, edited by Heminges and Condell, in 1623: 
on the supposition that the plays mentioned by Meres 
(of which, however, no other traces can be found, 
during William Shakespeare's life), besides those named 
in Manningham's and For man's diaries, and the "Ac- 
count of the Eevels at Court," are the identical plays 
now included in the Shakespearean drama. The dates 
are Mr. Grant White's. 



PART VI. — THE NEW THEORY. 



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290 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

A play called "Duke Humphrey/' attributed to 
Shakespeare, was amongst the dramatic manuscripts 
destroyed by the carelessness of Warburton's servant, 
in the early part of the last century, as appears by the 
list preserved in the British Museum — MS. Lans- 
downe, 849. 

Leaving out these plays mentioned by Meres, we 
then have twenty-one entirely new plays, which never 
appeared in William Shakespeare's life, first appear- 
ing in Heminges and Condell's edition. 

It appearing, then, that, of some forty-two plays 
credited to William Shakespeare during his lifetime, 
Heminges and Condell selected only twenty-five, and 
printed and bound up with those twenty-five nine 
plays which nobody had ever heard of in print or on 
the stage or any where else, until William Shakespeare 
had been dead and in his grave seven years, besides 
the " Othello," which was first heard of five years 
after his death : it follows either that Heminges and 
Condell knew that William Shakespeare was in the 
habit of allowing plays to be called by his name which 
he never wrote, or that Heminges and Condell's collec- 
tion of " Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, His- 
tories, and Tragedies, published according to the true 
original copies," is nothing more or less than a col- 
lection of plays written prior to the year 1623, and 
not earlier than the reign of Elizabeth. The Shakes- 
pearean® may take either horn of the dilemma they 
please. " Pericles," one of the plays rejected by Hem- 
inges and Condell has since been restored to favor, 
and no editor now omits it. Surely, under the cir- 
cumstances, we are justified in asking the question: 
" If William Shakespeare ever wrote any plays or 



PART VI. — THE NEW THEORY. 291 

poems, which of the above did he write, and which 
are 'doubtful?'" 

Whether the hand that wrote the "Hamlet" also 
composed the " Fair Em;" or the classicist who pro- 
duced the " Julius Csesar " and the " Coriolanus " at 
about the same time achieved " The Merry Devil " 
and " The London Prodigal," is a question lying 
within that sacred, peculiar realm of "criticism" 
which has "established" and forever "proved" so 
many wonderful things about " our Shakespeare " — a 
realm beyond our purview in these pages, and 
wherein we should be a trespasser. Fortunately, 
however, the question has been settled for us by those 
to whom criticism is not ultra vires, and may safely be 
said to be at rest now and forever. The burden of the 
judgment of the whole critical world is of record 
that the only true canon of "William Shakespeare" 
consists of the plays first brought together in one book 
by Heminges and Condell, plus the "Pericles;" and 
that certain of the above-mentioned plays, known to 
have been published under the name of William 
Shakespeare are " spurious ;" that, during the lifetime 
of William Shakespeare, and in the city where he 
dwelt — under his very nose, that is to say — divers and 
sundry plays did appear from time to time which he 
did not write, but which he fathered. Whether, in 
pure philanthrophy and charity, he regarded these as 
little Japhets in search of a father, and so, pitying 
their abandoned and derelict condition, assumed their 
paternity, or, whether he took advantage of their bas- 
tardy for mere selfish and ill-gotten gain, the criti- 
cal world - find it unprofitable to speculate. But 
there can be no reasonable doubt that, in London in 



292 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

the days of Elizabeth, in the name of " William 
Shakespeare " there was much the same sort of com- 
mon trade-mark as exists, in Cologne, in the days of 
Victoria, in the name " Jean Maria Farina" — that it 
was at everybody's service. And if William Shakes- 
peare farmed out his name to playwrights, just as the 
only original Farina farms out his to makers of. 
the delectable water of Cologne, wherein shall we 
find fault? If, two hundred years after, a lesser Sir 
Walter of Abbotsford, be acquitted of moral obliquity 
in denying his fatherhood of " Waverly," for the sake 
of the offspring, surely the elastic ethics of authorship, 
for the sake of the great book, will stretch out far 
enough to cover the case of a Shakespeare, who neither 
affirmed nor denied, but only held his peace ! William 
Shakespeare, at least in the days when Lord Coke says 
that a play-actor was, in contemplation of law, a vag- 
abond and a tramp, 1 never had to shift for his living. 
He always had money to spend, and money to lend, 
in the clays when we know many of his contemporaries 
in the theatrical and dramatic line were " in continued 
and utter extremity, willing to barter exertion, name, 
and fame for the daily dole that gets the daily dinner." 2 
Of all the co-managers — and, among them, one Bur- 
bage was the Booth or Forrest of his clay — William 
Shakespeare is the only one whose pecuniary success 
enables him to retire to become a landed gentleman 
with a purchased " Esquire " to his name. 

1 " The fatal end," he says, " of these five is beggary — the al- 
oherayst, the monopotext, the concealer, the informer, and the 
poetaster." A " play-actor," he elsewhere affirms, was a fit sub- 
ject for the grand jury, as a " vagrant." 

2 "Chambers's Edinburgh Journal," August 7, 1852, p. 88. 



PART VI. — THE NEW THEORY. 293 

No wonder Robert Greene, a well-known* con- 
temporary actor, but " who led the skeltering life pe- 
culiar to his trade," and who had either divined or 
shared the secret of the " Shakespearean " dramas, 
raised his voice in warning of the masquerade in bor- 
rowed plumes! "Was "William Shakespeare a shrewd 
masquerader, who covered his tracks so well that the 
search for a fragment of Shakespearean manuscript or 
holograph, which has been as thorough and ardent as 
ever was search for the philosopher's stone, has been 
unable to unearth them? Certainly no scrap or mor- 
sel has been found. The explanation of all this mys- 
tery, according to the New Theory, is of very little 
value, except in so far as it throws light upon what 
otherwise seems inexplicable, namely, that these mag- 
nificent philosophical dramas (which are more pre- 
cious in our libraries as text-book and poems than as 
stage shows wherewith to pass an idle evening in our 
enlightened day) should have been popular with the 
coarse audiences of the times from which they date. 
But, if, to conceal their real authors, these magnificent 
productions were simply sent out under a name that 
was at every body's disposal, the discovery is of ex- 
ceeding interest. From the lofty masterpiece of the 
" Hamlet" to what M. Taine calls "a debauch of im- 
agination . . . which no fair and frail dame in 
London would be without " * — the " Yen us and 
Adonis " — it was immaterial what they printed as 
his, so this William Shakespeare earned his fee for 
his silence. As for young Southampton — then just 
turned of nineteen — his part in the covert work of the 

1 Crawley, quoted by Taine, " English Literature," book ii., 
chapter iv. 



294 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

junta»might, and, indeed, seems to have been, the ac- 
cepting of the famous dedication. That a rustic 
butcher-lad should, while holding horses at the door 
of a city theater, produce as "the first heir of his in- 
vention " — the very first thing he turned his pen to — 
so maturely voluptuous a poem as the u Venus and 
Adonis," would be a miracle, among all the other 
miracles, not to be lost sight of. 

We believe that historical and circumstantial evi- 
dence alone is adequate to settle or even to disturb 
this Shakespearean question ; for it appears to be the 
unanimous verdict of criticism that the style of Bacon 
and the style of " Shakespeare " are as far apart as 
the poles. Experts have even gone so far as to reduce 
both to a " euphonic test," 2 and pronounce it impossi- 
ble that the two could have been written by the same 
hand. But this is not very valuable as evidence; for 
never, we think, can mere expert evidence be of itself 
sufficient as to questions of forgery of authorship any 
more than of autograph. If mere literary style had 
been all the evidence accessible, our Shakespeareans 
would have been making oath to the Ireland forgeries 
to-day as stoutly as when, in the simplicity of their 
hearts, they swore the impromptus of a boy of eighteen 
surpassed any thing in " Hamlet " or Holy Writ. 
Even Mr. Spedding, who ignores any " Baconian 
Theory," in writing the life of Bacon, admits that 
whenever a literary doubt has to be decided by the 
test of style, " the reader must be allowed to judge for 
himself." It was only by just such circumstantial evi- 
dence as has been grouped in these papers (such as the 

2 Wilkes's "Shakespeare from an American point of view," 
Part III. 



PART VI. — THE NEW THEORY. 295 

Elizabethan orthography and philology — the use of 
Roman instead of Arabic numerals, etc.) that the Ire- 
land imposture was exploded. Forgery is the imita- 
tion of an original, and, if the original be inimitable, 
there can surely be no forgery. In the case of forgery 
of a signature, lawyers and experts know that the 
nearer the imitation, the more easy is it detectable; 
for no man writes his own name twice precisely alike, 
and, if two signatures attributed to the same hand are 
found to be foe similes, and, on being superimposed 
against the light, match each other in every detail, it 
is irrefutable evidence that one is intentionally simu- 
lated. 1 In the case of literary style, however, we are 
deprived of this safeguard, because, the more nearly 
exact the counterfeit, the more easilv the critic is de- 
ceivecl. Pope was not afraid to entrust whole sections 
of the paraphrase he called the " Odyssy of Homer," 
just as Michael Aug el o did his frescoes, to journey- 
workmen — and not a critic has ever been able to pro- 
nounce, or even guess, which was Pope and which 
was Pope's apprentice; and not only the Chatterton, 
Ireland, and Macpherson forgeries, but the history of 
merely sportive imitation and parody prove that lit- 
erary style is any thing but inimitable ; that, in fact, 
it requires no genius, and very little cleverness to 
counterfeit it. 2 'Nov is — what is incessantly appealed 

1 Hunt versus Lawless, New York Superior Court, November, 
1879. And see, also, Moore versus United States, 2 Otto, United 
States, 270. Criminal Law Journal, Jersey City, N. J., March, 
1881. Art, " Calligraphy and the Whittaker Case." 

2 The curious reader is referred to " Supercheries Literaries, 
Pastiches, etc.," one of the unique labors of the late M. Delapierre. 
London, Triibner & Co., 1872. 



296 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

to — "the internal evidence of the plays themselves " 
of any particular value to the end in view. Were the 
question before us, " Was the author of these works 
a poet, statesman, philosopher, lawyer?" etc., etc., this 
internal evidence would be, indeed, invaluable. But 
it is not. The question is not lohat, but who, was the 
author. Was his family name " Shakespeare," and 
was he christened " William " ? The Shakespearean 
has been allowed to confound these questions, and to 
answer them together, until they have become as in- 
separable as Demosthenes and his pebble-stones. But, 
once separated, it is manifest that tbe internal evidence 
drawn from the works themselves, however satisfac- 
tory as to the one question, is utterly incompetent as 
to the other, and that it is by purely external — that is 
to say, by circumstantial evidence, by history, and by 
the record — that the question before us must be an- 
swered, if, indeed, it ever is to be answered at all. 
And, therefore, it is by circumstantial evidence alone, 
we think, that literary imposture can be satisfactorily 
exposed. Neither can we trust to internal evidence 
alone; for an attempt to write the biography of Wil- 
liam Shakespeare by means of the internal evidence 
of the Shakespearean plays, has inevitably resulted 
in the questions we have already encountered: was 
Shakespeare a lawyer, was Shakespeare a physician — 
a natural philosopher — a chemist — a botanist — a classi- 
cal scholar — a student of contemporary life and man- 
ners — an historian — a courtier — an aristocrat — a bib- 
licist — a journeyman printer, and the rest! — and in 
giving us the fairy stories of Mr. Knight and Mr. De 
Quincy in place of the truth we crave. For we can 
not close our eyes to the fact that history very decid- 



PART VI. — THE NEW THEORY. 297 

edly negatives the idea that William Shakespeare, of 
Stratford, was either a lawyer, a physician, a courtier, 
a philosopher, an aristocrat, or a soldier. Moreover, 
while the internal evidence is fatal to the Shakespear- 
ean theory, it preponderates in favor of the Baconians,' 
for, when we should ask these questions concerning 
Francis Bacon, surely the answer of history would be, 
Yes — yes, indeed; all this was Francis Bacon. The 
minute induction of his new and vast philosophy did 
not neglect the analysis of the meanest herb or the 
humblest fragment of experimental truth that could 
minister to the comfort or the health of man. And 
where else, in the range of letters — except in the 
Shakespearean works, where kings and clowns alike 
take their figures of speech from the analogies of na- 
ture — is the parallel of all this faithful accumulation 
of detail and counterfeit handwriting of Mature ? The 
great ex-chancellor had stooped to watch even the 
" red-hipped humble-bee" and the " small gray-coated 
gnat." Had the busy manager been studying them as 
well ? His last act on earth was to alight from his car- 
riage to gather handfuls. of snow r , to ascertain if snow 
could be utilized to prevent decomposition of dead 
flesh ; and it is related that, in his dying moments — 
for the very act precipitated the fever of which he died 
— he did not forget to record that the experiment 
had succeeded " excellently well." From these to 
lordly music, 1 and in all the range between, no 
science had escaped Francis Bacon. Had the busy 

1 Ulrici, p. 248, book ii, Chapter vi., refers to "Two Gentlemen 
of Verona," Act 1, 8c. 2. as proving that the author of that play 
" possessed in an unusual degree the power of judging and un- 
derstanding the theory of music." 



298 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

manager followed or preceded the philosopher's 
footsteps, step by step, up through them all? And 
did he pause in his conception or adaptation of a play, 
pen in hand, to take a trip to Italy, or a run-up into 
Scotland to get the name of a hostelry or the topog- 
raphy of a highway, to make it an encyclopaedia as well 
as a play as he went along? If the manager alone 
was the author of these works, there is, we have seen, 
no refuge from this conviction. But, if, as is the New 
Theory, those plays were amplified for the press by a 
learned hand, perhaps, after all, he was the stage man- 
ager, actor, and human being that history asserts him 
to have been. If, as has been conjectured, William 
Shakespeare sketched the clowns and wenches with 
which these statelv dramas are relieved, it would ac- 
count for the supposed Warwickshire source of many 
of them. And if William Shakespeare was pretty 
familiar with the constabulary along his route between 
home and theater, so often traveled by himself and 
jolly coetaneans with heads full of Marian Hackett's 
ale, and thought some of them good enough to put 
into a play, his judgment has received the approval 
of many audiences beside those of the Bankside and 
Blackfriars. The Shakespearean plays, as now per- 
formed in our theaters, are the editions of Cibber, Gar- 
rick, Kemble, Kean, Macready, Booth, Irving, and 
others, and, while preserving still the dialogues which 
passed, perhaps, through Shakespeare's hands, retain 
no traces of his industry, once so valuable to the Globe 
and Blackfriars, but now rejected asunsuited to the exi- 
gencies of the modern stage. The " business " inserted 
in them by William Shakespeare's editorship has long 
since been rejected. Little as there is of the man of 



PART VI. — THE NEW THEORY. 299 

Stratford in our libraries, there is still less of him in 
our theaters in 1881. But the world still retains the 
honest Dogberry, who lived at Grendon, in Bucks, on 
the road from London to Stratfordtown, and doubtless 
many more of the witty manager's master strokes. 
At least, the "New Theory" and the "Delia Bacon 
Theory " coincide in this, that William Shakespeare 
was fortunate in the manuscripts brought to him, and 
grew rich in making plays out of them and matching 
them to his spectacles. 



Such, briefly sketched, are the theories concern- 
ing these glorious transcripts of the age of Elizabeth, 
which, while two centuries of literature between is ob- 
solete and moribund, are yet unwithered and unstaled, 
and the most priceless of all the treasuries of the age 
of Victoria. And yet, there seems to be a feeling that 
any exploration after their authorship is a sacrilege, 
and that this particular historical question must be 
left untouched — as Pythagoras would not eat beans, as 
parricidal — that William Shakespeare is William 
Shakespeare — and the doggerel curse of Stratford 
hangs over and forefends the meddling with his bones. 
But no witch's palindrome for long can block the 
march of reason and of research. Modern scholarship 
is every day dissolving chimera, and, if this Shakes- 
peare story has no basis of truth, it must inevitably be 
abolished along with the rest. If this transcendent 
literature had come down to us without the name, 
would it have been sacrilege to search for its paternity? 
And does the mere name of William Shakespeare 
make that, which is otherwise expedient, infamous? 



300 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

Or, is this the meaning of the incantation on the tomb 
— that cursed shall he be that seeks to penetrate the 
secret of the plays ? Such, indeed, was the belief that 
drove poor Delia Bacon mad. But we decline to see 
any thing but the calm historical question. It seems to 
us that, if we are at liberty to dispute as much as we 
like as to whether two a's or only one, or three e's or 
only two belong of right in the name " Shakespeare," 
surely it can not be debarred us to ask of the Past the 
origin of the thousand-souled pages we call by that 
name. We believe that, if the existence of these three 
theories — as to each of which it is possible to say so 
much — proves any thing, it proves that history and cir- 
cumstantial evidence oppose the possibility of "Wil 
liam Shakespeare's authorship of the works called h s, 
and that there is a reasonable doubt as to whether 
any one man did write, or could have written, either 
with or without a Bodleian or an Astor Library at his 
elbow, the whole complete canon of the Shakespearean 
works. 

But is there not a refuge from all these more or less 
conflicting theories in the simple canon that human 
experience is a safer guide than conjecture or miracle? 
In our own day, the astute manager draws from bushels 
of manuscript plays, submitted to him by ambitious 
amateurs or plodding playwrights, the few morsels 
he deems worthy of his stage, and, restringing them 
on a thread of his own, or another's, presents the re- 
sult to his audiences. Can we imagine a reason why 
the same process should have been improbable in the 
days of Elizabeth and James? And if among theso 
amateurs and playwrights there happened to be the 
same proportion of lawyers, courtiers, politicians, 



PART VI. — THE NEW THEORY. 301 

soldiers, musicians, physicians, naturalists, botanists, 
and the rest (as well as contributions from the hun- 
dreds of learned clerks whom the disestablishment of 
the monasteries had driven to their wits for support), 
that we would be likely to find among the correspond- 
ing class to-day, it would surely be a less violent ex- 
planation of "the myriad-minded Shakespeare," than 
to conjecture the " Shakespeare" springing, without an 
interval for preparation, at once into the finished 
crown and acme of each and all of these. In fact, 
is it not William Shakespeare the editor, and not 
the author, to whom our veneration and gratitude are 
due ? 

It almost seems as if not only the skepticism of 
the doubter but the criticism of scholarship have 
all along tended irresistibly to accept this com- 
promise, as all criticism must eventually coincide 
with history, if it be criticism at all. The closest 
examination of the Shakespearean plays has re- 
vealed to scholars traces of more than one hand. It 
is past a hundred years since Theobald declared that, 
" though there are several master strokes in these 
three plays (viz.: the three parts of 'King Henry 
VI.'), yet I am almost doubtful whether they we're en- 
tirely of his (Shakespeare's) writing. And unless they 
were wrote by him very early, I should rather imagine 
them to have been brought to him as a director of the 
stage, and so have received some finishing beauties at 
his hands. An accurate observer will easily see the 
diction of them is more obsolete, and the numbers 
more mean and prosaical than in the generality of his 
genuine composition." 1 We have elsewhere shown 

1 Theobald's Shakespeare (1733). Vol. IV., p. 110. 



302 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

that Farmer stumbled upon the same difficulty. 
Malone "wrote a long dissertation," says Mr. Grant 
White, "to show that the three parts of 'King Henry 
VI.' were not Shakespeare's, but had only been altered 
and enriched by him; and that the first ' part ' was 
written by another person than the author of the sec- 
ond and third." 1 Drake proposed that the " First 
Part of 'King Henry VI.' be excluded from future edi- 
tions of Shakespeare's Works, because it offers no 
trace of any finishing strokes from the master bard." 2 
"It remains to inquire," says Hallam (after a discus- 
sion of these plays, which he says Shakespeare re- 
modeled from two old plays " in great part by Marlowe, 
though Greene seems to have put in for some share in 
their composition"), "who are to claim the credit of 
these other plays, so great a portion of which has 
passed with the world for the genuine work of Shakes- 
peare." 3 And again, what share he (Shakespeare) 
may have had in similar repairs of the many plays he 
represented, can not be determined. 4 And Dyce, Hal- 
liwell, and all the others follow Mr. Hallam (whose 
authority is Greene's well-known complaint about the 
"Johannes Factotum, who struts about with his t3 f ger's 
heart wrapped in a player's hide;" 5 which al- 
lusion to a line in the third part of Henry the Sixth, 
locates the particular " steal " which Greene had most 
at heart when he complained). Last of all comes Mr. 

1 An essay on the authorship of the three parts of King Henry 
the Sixth. By Richard Grant White. Riverside Press. H. O. 
Houghton & Co., Cambridge, Mass., 1859. 

2 Shakespeare and His Times. Vol. II., p. 297. 

3 Note to Hallam' s Literature of Europe. Part II., chap, vi., § 30. 
4 Id.,§35. 

6 " 0, tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide." — III. Hen. VI. 



PART VI. — THE NEW THEORY. 303 

Grant White, a most profound believer in " Shakes- 
peare, and all that Dame implies," with " An Essay on 
the authorship of the Three Parts of King Henry the 
Sixth," 1 to prove that William Shakespeare, in pla- 
giarizing from the earlier tragedies, only plagiarized 
from himself, he himself having really written all that 
was worth saving in them ! Mr. White labors consider- 
ably to fix the exact date at which Marlowe, Peele and 
Greene — the most eminent play writers of the day — 
employed a raw Stratford youth, just truanting in 
London, to kindly run over, prune, and perfect their 
manuscripts for them, and to clear Mr. White's 
Shakespeare from the stigma of what, if true, Mr. 
White admits to have been a " want of probity on 
Shakespeare's part, accompanied by a hardly less 
culpable indifference on the part of his fellows." 2 This 
"indifference" can not be charged to one sufferer, at 
least, Robert Greene, who was not silent when he saw 
his work unblushingly appropriated: thus giving us 
assurance of one occasion, at least, upon which 
William Shakespeare posed as editor instead of 
author. 

At any rate, we have seen the circumstantial evi- 
dence has been corroborated by the experts (for so, to 
borrow a figure, let us call them) Aubrey, Cartwright, 
Digges, Denham, Fuller, 3 and Ben Jonson. All these 
assure us (Ben Jonson twice, once in writing and once 
in conversation) that William Shakespeare was a nat- 

1 Cambridge, Mass. : H. 0. Houghton & Co. Riverside Press, 
1859. 

2 Id., p. 100. 

'See the quotation from his "Worthies of England," in the 
foot-note, ante, this chapter. 



304 THE SHAKESPEAKEAN MYTH. 

ural wit — a wag in the crude — but that he wanted art. 
Old Dominie Ward made a note "to read Shakes- 
peare's plays to post him," but even he had heard 
that he was a wit, but that he wanted art. 1 This tes- 
timony may not compel conviction, but it is all we 
have; we must take it, or go without any testimony 
at all. At any rate, it sustains and is sustained by the 
circumstances, and these seven different witnesses, 
at least, testify without procurement collusion, or 
knowledge of the use to be made of their testimony, 
and opposed to them all is only the little elegiac 
rhyme by one of themselves: 

" Yet must I not give nature all — thy art, 
My gentle Shakespeare, must enjoy a part." 

Only one single scrap of mortuary effusion on which to 
hang the fame of centuries ! And if we exclude the 
circumstantial evidence and the expert testimony as 
false, and admit the one little rhyme as true, then our 
reason, judgment, and inner consciousness must ac- 
cept as the author of the learned, laborious, accurate, 
eloquent, and majestic Sheakespearean pages, a wag — 
a funny fellow T whose "wit (to quote Jonson again) 
was in his own power," but not "the rule of it," so 
much so, "that sometimes it was necessary he should 
be stopped." Surely it is a much less violent supposi- 
tion that this funny Mr. Shakespeare — who happened 
to be employed in the theater where certain master- 
pieces were taken to be cut up into plays to copy out 
of them each actor's parts — that this waggish penman, 
as he wrote out the parts in big, round hand, improved 
on or interpolated a palpable hit, a merry speech, the 

1 Ante, page 68. 



PART VI. — THE NEW THEORY. 305 

last popular song, or sketched entire a role with a 
name familiar to his boyish ear — the village butt, or 
sot, or justice of the peace, 1 may be ; or, why not some 
fellow scapegrace of olden times by Avon banks? 
He did it with a swift touch and a mellow humor that 
relieved and refreshed the stately speeches, making 
the play all the more available and the copyist all the 
more valuable to the management. But, all the same, 
how this witty Mr. Shakespeare would have roared at 
a suggestion that the centuries after him should chris- 
ten by his — the copyist's — name all the might and 
majesty and splendor, all the philosophy and pathos 
and poetry, every word that he wrote out, unblotting 
a line, for the players ! 

It must be conceded, say the new theorists: 
I. That the plays, whether in the shape we now 
have them or not, are, at least, under the same 

1 He had not failed to see Dogberry and Shallow in the little 
villages of Warwickshire — and the wonderful " Watch." The 
" Watch " of those days was indeed something to wonder at. 
In a letter of Lord Burleigh to Sir Francis Walsingham, written 
in 1586, the writer says that he once saw certain of them stand- 
ing "so openly in pumps" in a public place, that "no suspected 
person would come nigh them;" and, on his asking them what 
they stood there for, they answered that they were put there to 
apprehend three men, the only description they had of them 
was that one of them had a hooked nose. " If they be no better in- 
structed but to find three persons by one of them having a 
hooked nose, they may miss thereof," reflects Burghley, with 
much reason. Mr. Halliwell Phillips, in his "Outline of the 
Life of William Shakespeare (Brighton, 1881), page 66, thinks 
that this is unlikely, because the magistrate mentioned by 
Aubrey would have been too old in 1642, if he had been the 
model sought. 
26 



306 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

names and with substantially the same dramatis per- 
sons. 

II. That William Shakespeare was the stage man- 
ager, or stage editor; or, at any rate, touched up the 
plays for representation. 

III. That the acting copies of the plays, put into 
the hands of the players to learn their parts from, 
were more or less in the handwriting of William 
Shakespeare, and that from these acting copies the 
first folio of 1623 was set up and printed. 

At least, the best evidence at hand seems to estab- 
lish all three of these propositions. This evidence is 
meager and accidental, but, for that very reason, in- 
voluntary, and, therefore, not manufactured; and it 
establishes the above propositions, as far as it goes, as 
follows : 

I. In a volume, " Poste, with a Packet of Madde- 
Letters," printed in 1603, a young woman is made to 
say to her lover : " It is not your hustie rustie can make 
me afraide of your big lookes, for I saw the plaie of 
Ancient Pistoll, where a craking coward was well 
cudgelled for his knavery; your railing is so near the 
rascall that I am almost ashamed to bestow so good a 
name as the rogue upon you." 

Again, Sharpham, in his " Fleire," printed in 1607, 
has this piece of dialogue : 

"Kni. — And how lives he with 'am? 

"Fie. — Faith, like Thisbe in the play, a' has almost 
killed himselfe with the scabbard I" 

The first author thus makes his young woman to 
have seen Henry V., and the second alludes to the 
Midsummer-Night's Dream, where the bumpkin who 
plays Thisbe is made to kill himself by falling on his 



PART VI. — THE NEW THEORY. 307 

scabbard instead of his sword. Besides, in the imper- 
fect versions of the plays which the printers were able 
to make up, from such unauthorized sources as best 
served them, it is thought that there are unmistaka- 
ble evidences that one of the sources was the short- 
hand of a listener, who, not catching a word or phrase 
distinctly, would put down something that sounded 
enough like it to betray the sources and his copy. 
For example: In the spring of 1602, a play called 
" The Revenge of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark," was 
presented at the Globe theater. In 1603, two book- 
sellers, Ling and Trundell, printed a play of that title, 
put William Shakespeare's name to it, and sold it. 
Now, in this version, we have such errors as " right 
done" for "write down" (Act L, Scene ii.) ; "inven- 
om'd .speech" for " in venom steeped" (Act L, Scene 
i.); "I'll provide for you a grave" for "most secret 
and most grave" (Act III., Scene iv.) ; " a beast devoid 
of reason " for " a beast that wants discourse of rea- 
son," and the like. Ling and Trundell, somehow or 
other, procured better copy, and printed a corrected 
edition in the following year; but the errors in their 
first edition were precisely such as would result from 
an attempt to report the play phonetically, as it w T as 
delivered by the actors on the stage. All the printers 
of the day seem to have made common piracy out of 
these plays, impelled thereto by their exceeding popu- 
larity. (Nash says that the first part of King Henry 
VI., especially, had a wonderful run for those days, 
being witnessed by at least ten thousand people. 1 Of 

1 We take all these references from " Outlines of the Life of 
Shakespeare," by I. 0. Halliwell Phillips (Brighton. Printed for 
the author's friends, for presents only. 1881), page 40, to which 
capital volume we acknowledge our exceeding obligation. Mr. 



308 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

this play a garbled version was put on the market by 
Millington, who, soon after, did the same thing by the 
Henry V.) 

II. Davenant instructed Betterton how to render 
the part of Henry VIII., assuring him that he (Dave- 
nant) had his own instructions from Lowin, and that 
Lowin got them from William Shakespeare in per- 
son. 1 (We have not accepted Davenant's evidence as 
likely to be of much value, when assuming to be 
Shakespeare's son, successor, literary executor, and 
the like, but this does not appear, on its face, improb- 
able, and is no particular loss if untrue.) Eavens- 
croft, who re-wrote Titus Andronicus in 1687, says, in 
his preface : " I have been told by some anciently con- 
versant w T ith the stage, that it (this play) was not 
originally his (Shakespeare's), but brought by a pri- 
vate actor to be acted, and he only gave some master 
touches to one or two of the principal parts or char- 
acters." 2 

" I am- assured," says Gildon, 3 " from very good 
hands, that the person that acted lago was in much 
esteem as a comedian, which made Shakespeare put 
several words and expressions into his part, perhaps 
not so agreeable to his character, to make the audi- 
ence laugh, who had not yet learned to endure to be 
serious a whole play." (But if Shakespeare put them 
in to "catch the ear of the groundlings," who took 

Grant White in the Atlantic Monthly, October 1881, believes 
that he is able to trace the surreptitious "copy" of this first 
Hamlet to the actor who took the part of Voltimand. The in- 
ference from Mr. White's account of the transaction, is precisely 
that we have noted in the text. 

'Id. 2 Id. 

Reflections on Eymer's "Short View of Tragedy," quoted by 
Mr. Halliwell Phillips, in his work cited in last note. 



PART VI. — THE NEW THEORY. 309 

them out again for the folio of 1623? The Baconians 
would probably ask: "Did Bacon, after Shakespeare 
was dead?" And it could not have been a proof- 
reader; for, if there was any proof-reader, he was the 
most careless one that ever lived. The folio of 1623 
is crowded with typographical errors.) Somebody — 
not necessarily Shakespeare — was in the habit of in- 
troducing into these Shakespearean plays the popular 
songs of the day. For example, the song, "A Lover 
and His Lass," in "As you Like it." was written by 
Thomas Morley, and printed in his "First Book of 
Ayres; or, Little Short Songs," in 1600. 1 And the 
ballad, « Farewell, Dear Love," in " Twelfth Night," 
has previously appeared in 1601, in the "Book of 
Ayres" of Robert Jones. 2 It is probable, however, 
says Mr. Halliwell Phillips, that William Shakespeare 
had withdrawn from the management of the Globe; at 
the date of its destruction during the performance of 
Henry VIII. (which Mr. Phillips calls the first play 
on the English stage in which dramatic art was sacri- 
ficed to stage effect. It is curious, this being the case, 
to find the New Shakespeare Society rejecting the 
Henry VIII. as not Shakespearean on the philological 
evidence, and assuring us that Wolsey's soliloquy is 
not Shakespeare's, as did Mr. Spedding so many years 
before). The story of Queen Elizabeth's order for 
" Fal staff in Love" first appeared, in 1702, in the 

1 In the last issue of the "Transactions of the New Shakes- 
peare Society" is a copy of what purports to be a manuscript 
respecting the delivery of certain red cloth to Shakespeare, on 
the occasion of a reception to James I., by the corporation of 
London, in 1604, unearthed and guaranteed by Mr. Furnivall. 

2 Folio, London, 1601. 



310 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

preface to John Dennis's " Comicale Gallant," from 
whom Rowe quoted. Although smacking of the same 
flavor as the Southampton and King James " yarns " — 
it is worth noting that this story may possess, per- 
haps, some vestige of foundation. If these sounding 
plays, so full of religion, politics, philosophy, and 
statecraft, were presented at Shakespeare's theater, it 
is only natural that it should come to Elizabeth's ears. 
The lion Queen did not care to have her subjects in- 
structed too far. She liked to keep them well in 
hand, and was only — she and her ministers — too 
ready to "snuff treason in certain things that went by 
other's names." The run of comedies at other theaters 
were harmless enough (an adultery for a plot, and an 
unsuspecting husband for a butt. This was a comedy ; 
plus a little blood, it was a tragedy). Let the people 
have their fill of amusement, but it is better not to 
meddle with philosophy and politics. So there are 
things more unlikely to have happened than that 
Elizabeth, through her Lord Chamberlain, should 
have intimated to manager Shakespeare to give them 
something more in the run and appetite of the clay. 1 
The "Merry Wives of Windsor" was, in due time, 
underlined. But, somehow or other, it was with a 
would-be adulterer, rather than an injured husband, 
for a butt; and, somehow or other, Galen and Escula- 
pius and Epicurius had intruded where there was no 
need of them. The salaciousness Elizabeth wanted 
(if the story is true) was all there, as well as the 
transformation scene; but, at the end, there is a re- 

1 Collier — "Lives of Shakespeare's Actors, Introduction, page 
xv." — says that there were at least two, and perhaps three, other 
William Shakespeares in London in these days. 



PART VI. — THE NEW THEORY. 311 

buke to lechery and to lecherous minds that is not 
equivocal in its terms. 1 But that any of this Shakes- 
peare fortune came, by way of gift or otherwise, from 
Southampton, there is no ground, except silly and 
baseless rumor, for believing. If Southampton had 
been the Rothschild of his time — which he was very far 
from being — he would not have given a thousand 
pounds (a sum we have estimated as equaling §25,000 
to-day, but which Mr. Grant White puts at $30,000, 
and which Mr. Halliwell Phillips, 2 on account of the 
"often fictitious importance attached to cash, arising 
from its comparative scarcity in those days," says 
ought even be as high as twelve pounds for one) to a 
casual acquaintance. The mere passing of such a 
sum would seem to involve other relations; and 
if Southampton knew Shakespeare, or Shakespeare 
Southampton, let it be demonstrated from some auto- 
biographical or historical source— from some other 
source than the " Biographies of William Shakes- 
peare," written by those slippery rhapsodists, the 
Shakespeareans. If Damon and Pythias were friends, 
let it appear from the biographies of Damon, as well 
as from the biographies of Pythias. Let us find it in 
some of Southampton's papers, or in the archives or 
papers of some of his family, descendants, contem- 
poraries, or acquaintances; in the chronicles of Eliz- 
abeth, Ealeigh, Cecil, Essex, Kutland, Montgomery, 
Camden, Coke, Bacon, Tobie Mathew, Ben Jonson, 
or of somebody alive and with open eyes in London 

1 Perhaps, if the story ,were true, a rebuke to Elizabeth per- 
sonally in the line (Act V., Scene v.), " Our radiant Queen hates 
sluts and sluttery." 

2 "Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare," note, page 17. 



312 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

at about that date, before we yield it historical assent, 
and make oath to it so solemnly. As a matter of fact, 
and as the industrious Mr. Lodge confesses, 1 there is 
no such trace or record. Except from the "biogra- 
phers" of Shakespeare, no note, hint, or surmise, con- 
necting the two names, can be anywhere unearthed, 
and they only draw the suggestion on which they 
build such lofty treatises from a dedication printed in 
the days when printers helped themselves to any name 
they wanted without fear of an injunction out of 
chancery. That any sonnets were ever dedicated to 
Southampton by anybody, is, we have seen, pure in- 
vention. 

III. But that the famous First Folio of 1623 was 
set up from piecemeal parts written for separate actors, 
and that these were in William Shakespeare's hand- 
writing, there seems to be contemporary circumstan- 
tial evidence. 

We have seen that, although Ben Jonson has, for 
two hundred and fifty years, been believed when he 
said in poetry that William Shakespeare w T as not only 
the " Star of Poets " for genius, but that besides he 
would " sweat and strike the second heat upon the 
muses's anvil;" when he said in prose that "The 
players often mentioned it as an honor to Shakespeare 
that in writing (whatever he wrote) he never blotted 
out a line," he was supposed to be using a mere figure 
of speech. But it seems that he was telling the truth. 
For, in 1623 — Shakespeare having been dead seven 
years — Heminges and Condell — two "players" (i.e., 

1 Portraits, Henry Wriothlesey, Earl of Southampton, Vol. 
III., page 155, Bonn's edition. 



PART VI. — THE NEW THEORY. 313 

actors), and the same that Shakespeare in his "Will calls 
his "fellows" — publish the first edition of the plays 
we now call " Shakespeare " — and, on the title-page of 
that edition, advertise them as " published according 
to the true original copies." Further on in their pre- 
face, they repeat, almost in his very words, Ben Jon- 
son's statement, asserting that " We have scarce re- 
ceived from him (William Shakespeare) a blot in his 
papers." What papers ? What indeed, but " the true 
original copies" of these plays which were in William 
Shakespeare's handwriting ? What else could it have 
been that "the players" (according to Ben Jonson) 
saw ? Docs anybody suppose that the poet's own first 
draft, untouched of the file and unperfumed of the 
lamp, weilt into "the players'" hands, for them to 
learn their parts from ? And, even if one player was 
allowed to study his part from the inspired author's 
first draft, his fellow "players " must have taken or re- 
ceived a copy or copies of their parts ; they could not 
all study their parts from the same manuscript. The 
only reasonable supposition, therefore, is, that William 
Shakespeare made it part of his duties at the theater 
to write out in a fair hand the parts for the different 
"players" (and no wonder they mentioned it, as " an 
honor" to him, that he lightened their labors consid- 
erably by the legibility of his penmanship, by never 
blotting out a line) and that, in course of time, these 
" true original copies " were collected from their fel- 
low-actors by Heminges and Condell, and by them 
published; they remarking, in turn, upon the excel- 
lence of the penmanship so familiar to them. There 
is only wanted to confirm this supposition, a piece of 
27 



314 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

actual evidence as to what Heminges and Condell did 
print from. 

Now, it happens that, by their own careless proof 
reading, Heminges and Condell have actually sup- 
plied this piece of missing circumstantial evidence, as 
follows: Naturally, in these true original copies of a 
particular actor's part, the name of the actor assuming 
that part would be written in the margin, opposite to 
or instead of the name of the character he was to per- 
sonate ; precisely as is done to-day by the theater copy- 
ist in copying parts tor distribution among the com- 
pany. It happened that, in setting up the types for 
this first edition from these fragmentary actors' copies, 
the printers would often accident aly, from following 
" copy" too closely, set up these real names of the ac- 
tors instead of the names of the characters. And — as 
any one taking up a copy or fac-simile of this famous 
"first folio " can see for himself — the editors carelessly 
overlooked these errors in the proof, and there they 
remain to this day : "Jacke Wilson," for " Balthazar ;" 
"Andrew" and " Cowley," for "Dogberry;" "Kempe," 
for "Verges," and the like — the names of Shakespeare's 
actors — instead of the parts they took in the piece. 
It seems superfluous to again suggest that these un- 
blotted " copies " could not have been the author's first 
draft of a play, or that an author does not write his 
compositions in manifold, or that there had been many 
actors to learn their parts in the course of from six- 
teen to twenty years. 

Besides — even if Heminges and Condell had not told 
us — it would have still been perfectly evident, from an 
inspection of the "first folio," that the "copy" it was 
set up from was. never completely in their hands, but 



PART VI. — THE NEW THEORY. 315 

was collected piecemeal during the manufacture. For 
iustauce, we see w T here the printers i eft a space of twenty- 
nine pages, between "Romeo and Juliet" and "Julius 
Csesar," in which to print the " Timon of Athens." But 
all the copy they could find of the " Timon " only 
made eighteen pages, and so — by huge " head pieces " 
and "tail pieces," and a " Table of the Actor's Names " 
(given in no other instance) in coarse capitals — they 
eked out the "signature; " and, by omitting the whole 
of the next "signature," carried the pagination over 
from " 98 " to " 109." The copy for " Troilus and Cres- 
sida" seems not to have been received until the vol- 
ume was in the binder's hands (which is remarkable, 
too, for that play had been in print for fourteen years). 
The play is not mentioned in the table of contents, 
but is tucked in without paging (except that the first 
five pages are numbered 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, whereas 
the paging of the volume had already reached 232). 
"Troilus and Cressida," thus printed, fills two " sig 
natures " lacking one page, and so somebody at hand 
wrote a "Prologue" in rhyme — setting out the argu- 
ment—to save the blank page, and the like. What- 
ever "papers" Heminges and Condell "received from 
William Shakespeare then, were fair, unblotted copies 
of the actors' parts, made by him for their use. It ap- 
pears then, that — minute scholarships and the records 
apart — the foreman of a printing-house would have 
been at any time in the past two hundred and fifty 
years, without assistance from the commentators, able 
to settle the great Shakespearean authorship contro- 
versy. 

While — from one standpoint — this testimony of 
the types is strong circumstantial evidence against 



316 THE SHAKESPEAREAN MYTH. 

the Baconian theory, taken from another standpoint 
it is quite as strongly corroborative. For on the 
one hand, Bacon was alive when this folio was 
printed, and the man who rewrote his essays eleven 
times would scarcely have allowed his plays to go 
to the public so shiftlessly printed. But on the 
other hand, if the book was printed without consult- 
ing him, that insurmountable barrier — the fact that 
Bacon never claimed these plays — is sw T ept away at 
once. ' We have simply to assume that he always in- 
tended, at some convenient season, to acknowledge 
them : that he was not satisfied with them as they 
appeared in the Heminges and Condell edition, and 
proposed revising them himself before claiming them, 
(we know how difficult he found it to satisfy his own 
censorship) or that he purposed completing the series, 
(for which the sketch of the Henry VII may have been 
placed among his private memoranda) at his leisure. 
We have then only to imagine that death over- 
took him suddenly (his death was sudden) before this 
programme had been completed, and his not acknowl- 
edging them ; not leaving them — incomplete as he be- 
lieved them — to " the next ages," was characteristic of 
the man. 

"If I go, who remains? If I remain, who goes?" 
said Dante to the Council of Florence. Take the 
Shakespearean pages away from English literature, 
and what remains? Retain them, and what departs? 
And yet are men to believe that the writer of these 
pages left no impress on the history of his age and no 
item in the chronicle of his time? that, in the intens- 
est focus of the clear, calm, electric-light of nineteenth 
century inspection and investigation, their author 



PART VI. — THE NEW THEORY. 317 

stands only revealed in the gossip of goodwives or the 
drivel of a pot-house clientage? Who is it — his rea- 
son and judgment once enlisted — who believes this 
thing? 

Columbus discovered the continent we call after the 
name of another. Where shall we find written the 
names of the genii whose fruit and fame this Shakes- 
peare has stolen. Having lost "our Shakespeare" 
both to-day and forever, it will doubtless remain — as 
it is — the question, " Who wrote the Shakespearean 
dramas?" The evidence is all in — the testimony is 
all taken. Perhaps it is a secret that even Time will 
never tell, that is hidden deep down in the crypt 
and sacristy of the Past, whose seal shall never more 
be broken. In the wise land of China it is said that 
when a man has deserved well of the state, his 
countrymen honor, with houses and lands and gifts 
and decorations, not himself, but his father and his 
mother. Perhaps, learning a lesson from the Celestials, 
we might rear a shaft to the fathers and the mothers 
of the Immortality that wrote the Book of Nature, 
the mighty book which "age can not wither, nor cus- 
tom stale" and whose infinite variety for three centur- 
ies has been and, until Time shall be no more, will be 
close to the hearts of every age and cycle of men — 
household words for ever and ever, The Book — 
thank heaven ! — that nothing can divorce from us. 

THE END. 



INDEX. 



Actors, names of Shakespeare's printed by mistake in first folio, 

314. 
Actors, fellows of W. S. Did they suspect imposition ? 37. 

Of Shakespeare's day, expected to improvise, 260. 
Actresses, none in Shakespeare's day, 273. 
Addison, Joseph, his estimate of Shakespearean plays, 26. 
Alterations of the plays in 1st folio. See Emendations. 
Althea, classical error as to, 210. 
Angling, knowledge of, displayed in plays, 228. 
Anonymous authorship, 283. 

Or pseudonymic, fashionable in those days, 176. 
Anti-Shakespearean theories — 

A compromise of, suggested, 300. 

Theobald anticipates, 301. 
Areopagitica, Milton's, first asserted author's rights, 108. 
Aristotle, Bacon and Shakespeare misquote passage of, 241. 
Arms, John Shakespeare's, purchased by his son, 97. 

Coat of, " cut from whole cloth," 274. 

Obtained by falsehood, 274-275, note. 

Protest against them, 274, note. 

Purchased with Shakespeare's first earnings, 274. 

Why Shakespeare purchased, 274. 
Article in Chambers'. Journal first raises authorship question, 185. 
Aubrey, his testimony, 47, 69-71. 

Expert evidence of, 303-304. 
Audiences. See Plays. 

Did not want scientific treatises, 229. 

Formative days of, 263. 

Not critical, 13. 

The Shakespearean, 114-259. 

(319) 



320 INDEX. 

Author, his interest to be anonymous, 113. 

Rights, what were, 108. 

Compensation, how obtained, 108. 
Author of the plays. See Plays. 

His fidelity to national characteristics, 42. 

Insight of, into the human heart, no guess work, 43. 

Of text, did not write stage business, 117. 
Authorship of Henry VI., R. G. White's idea of, 303. 

Anonymous, 283. 

Anonymous or pseudonymic authorship, prevalent, 176. 
See Joint authorship. 

Insecurity of. See Author, Copyright, Nashe, Printers, 
Plays. 

Insecurity of authorship. See Star Chamber. 
Autographs of W. S. See " Florio"' autograph. 

B. 

Bacon, and Shakespeare misquote passage of Aristotle, 241. 
And Shakespeare, unknown to each other, 144. 
Appears in New Theory, 284. 
Believes in teaching history by drama, 242. 
Could have appraised the S. Drama 180. 
Did William Shakespeare write works of, 38, 39. 
Directs certain MS. locked up, 244. 
Driven to " the Jews,' 233. See " Shylock." 
His acquirements, 232. 
His estimate of the theatre, 203. 
His letter to the Queen, 237. 
His "Northumberland MS.," 242. 
His reasons for concealment, 201, 316. 
His "Sonnet" what may be, 280, 281. * 
His youth compared with Shakespeare's, 232. 
Last act of, his memorandum concerning, 297. 
Letter to Sir John Davies, 236, 237. 
May have brought together first folio, 236. 
Neglected nothing, 297. 
No cause to mourn for Elizabeth, 243. 
Not mentioned to Shakespeare by Jonson, 145. 



INDEX. 321 

Bacon, often wrote in other's names, 243. 

Or is he told of Shakespeare by, 145. 

Possesses the qualities assigned to author of the dramas, 175. 

Silent as to William Shakespeare, 180. 

Surmised philosophical purpose, 203. 

When appointed attorney-general plays cease to appear, 233. 
Bacon, Delia, apparent audacity of announcement, 186. 

Believed in a joint authorship, 206. 

Believes " Hamlet" to be key-note of the plays, 190. 

Claims to have discovered Bacon's clew, 192. 

Death of, 200. 

Estimate of her book, 196, note. 

Extracts from her first paper, 189. 

Her approach to an overt act, 197-199. 

Her belief as to the manuscripts, 193, 194. 

Her poverty, 188-195. 

Her question as to the MS. answered, 244. 

History of her theory, 188. 
What it really was, 191. 

Reception of her theory in America, 187. 
In England, 187. 

Supposed to be mad, 10, 11. 

But her madness contageous, 11. 

Visits Stratford, 174-195. 
Old Verulam, id. 

What her madness was, 191, 300. 

Writes her first paper in 1855, 186. 
"Baconian" and " Delia Bacon" theories discriminated, 201. 
Baconian theory, abstract of, 232. 

Bibliography of the, 246. 

Indifferent as to Wm. S. being a law student, 245. 

In general, what, 203. 

Preponderance for, 297. 
Bailey, Rev. John, invents a new Shakespeare story, 160, note. 
" Bartholomew Fair," induction to. See Jonson, Ben, 139. 
Becker Death Mask, the, 103. 
Bed, the second best, 50. 

Not explained by R. Gr. White or by Steevens, 65. 
u Beeston," author of " Schoolmaster story," 60. 



322 INDEX. 

" Beeston," who was he ? 160. 

Belleforest, borrowed from in the plays, 221. 

Berni, paraphrased by Iago, 64. 

Best seats at theatres on the stage, 273. 

Bible, Shakespeare and the, 60, note, 231. 

Bibliography of the Baconian theory, 246. 

" Biographies" of William Shakespeare, modern, 161. 

De Quincy's, 157. 
Birthday of W. S. See St. George's day. 
Blackfriars Theater, James Burbage builds, 256. 
Blood, circulation of the, 208-210. 
Boaden, James, his summary of the portraits, 93. 
Boccaccio, borrowed from in the plays, 221. 
Bohemia. See Sea-coast of Bohemia. 

Book-making, knowledge of, displayed in plays. See Printing. 
Botany, knowledge of, displayed in the plays. See Flowers. 
Boucicault, Dion, a surmised example of what W. S. was, 31. 

His suggestion, 285. 
Answer to, 285. 
Boys, took female parts in Shakespeare's day, 273. 
Brother of W. S. See Oldys. 

Brown C. Armitage, his discovery as to Sonnets, 278. 
Brown, Henry, theory of the Sonnets, 279. 
Bunyan, John, analogy of life to Shakespeare, 165, 166. 

Illustrations of what genius can not do, 164. 
Burbage, James, builds the Blackfriars theater, 256. 
Burbage, Richard, lines interpolated in Hamlet to suit, 34, note. 

Said to have painted portraits of W. S., 99. 
Burns, Robert, an example of genius, 162. 

Comparison between, and " Shakespeare," 219. 

Illustration of what genius can not do, 163. 
"Business" of Wm. Shakespeare, now obsolete, 298. 
Bust in possession of Garrick Club, 105. See Garrick Club Bust- 
Bust, the Stratford, 97. See Portraits. 

Whitewashed, by Malone, 97. 
Byron, Lord, his estimate of the Shakespearean plays, 19. 



INDEX. 323 



c. 



Campbell, Lord, his notice of the legal acquirements of W. S. 59. 
Canon of the plays, first folio plus Pericles, 291. 
Capell, preserves specimens of Shakespeare's wit, 270. 
Carlyle, Thomas, calls on Delia Bacon, 195. 

Suggested her writing first paper, 195. 
Cartwright, expert evidence as to, 303. 

Testimony as to Shakespeare's acquirements, 264. 
Catholic, Roman, was Shakespeare a, 117. See Papist. 
Chandos portrait, the, 97. 

Rumored to have been by Burbage, 99. 
Chatterton, Thomas, difference between his case and Shakes- 
peare's, 54. 
Chettle, wonders that Shakespeare does not mourn Elizabeth, 
243. 

His apology for Greene's expression, 125. 
Christian Monastery in Ephesus in days of Pericles, 116. 
Chronologies of the plays, absurdity of the so-called, 86. 
" Chronologies," where they all agree, 41. 
Cinthio, borrowed from in the plays, 221. 
Circumstantial evidence, corroborated, 303, passim. 

Necessary to these questions, 294. 
Classical knowledge, displayed in plays, 207, 208. 

Difficulties suggested by, 211. 
Clergy, benefit of, 262, note. 

Included all learned professions, id. 
Clown, the principal actor in Shakespearean theaters, 260, 261. 
Coat of arms, Shakespeare's. See Arms. 
Cohn, Albert, his theory as to Shakespeare in Germany, 216. 
Coincidences, Shakespearean's idea of the, 83, note. 
Coleridge, his opinion as to authorship, 45. 
Commentators, bore down upon the Shakespearean text, 10. 
Commentary, sample of the run of, 86. 
Compromise theory, 300; applied to Henry VI., 302. 

Theobald and others anticipate, 300, 301. 
Condell, Henry. See Heminges & Condell. 
Contemporaries of W. S., why they did not suspect him, or si- 
lent if they did, 57. 



324 INDEX. 

Contemporary statements in Baconian theory, 230. 
Conversations of Ben Jonson with Drummond of Hawthorn- 
den, 139. 
Copies, " true, original," identified, 312, 313, 314, 315. 
Copyright, Disraeli thinks first folio a scheme for, 249, note. 

First claimed 28 years after W. S.'s death, 108. 

First English law of, 106. See Author. 

Cornelius, Jansen, said to have been family painter of South- 
ampton, 101. 
Court of Star Chamber, takes jurisdiction of matters literary, 106. 
Curse of Stratford, 299, 300. 

D. 

Davies, Rev. Richard, his account of W. S., 73. 

Davies, Sir John, letter from Bacon to, 237. 

Davenant, Sir William, owned the Chandos portrait, 100. 

Claimed illegitimate descent from W. S., 100, note. 
Death mask, the Becker, 103. 
Dedication of the Sonnets, 277. 

Why insulting, 282. 

Twisted out of shape, 277. 

Simple explanation of, 278. 
"Delia Bacon" and "Baconian" theories, discriminated, 201. 
Delia Bacon and new theories coincide, 299. See Bacon, Delia. 
Denham, expert evidence of, 303, 304. 

Testimony as to Shakespeare's acquirements, 265. 
De Quincy, Thomas, his "biography" of W. S., 157. 

Analyzed, 157. 

Ignores authorities, 159. 
Deer stealing, "rejected on insufficient evidence," 114. 
Difficulty is that we know so much about W. S., rather than so 

little, 155. 
Digges, expert evidence of 303, 304. 

Testimony as to Shakesperean acquirements, 264. 
"Discoveries" of Ben Jonson, fatal to Shakespearean theory, 

134-136. 
Disraeli thinks first folio a scheme for copyright, 249, note. 
Dogberry, prototypes of, 304. 
Doubtful plays, the, 285, 286, 287. 



INDEX. 325 

Doubtful plays, the, never disowned by Shakespeare, 287. 

Not doubtful in Shakespeare's day, 285-290. 

One missing, 290. 
Dowdell Letter, the, 72. 

Dowden, Edward, locates Proserpo's Island, 88, note. 
Drama, esteemed by Bacon a form of teaching history, 242. 
Droeshout portrait, 92-94. 

Not flattering to its subject. 93. 

Only one ever " authenticated," 103. 

Probably accurate likeness, 94. 

Was faithfully engraved, 94. 
Drummond of Hawthornden, Ben Jonson's conversations with, 

139. 
Dryden, John, his estimate of Shakespearean plays, 21. 
Dugdale, his mention of Shakespeare, 77. 
" Duke Humphrey," a missing, doubtful play, 290. 
Dyce follows Hallam, 302. 

E. 

Earlom portrait, the, 102. 

Elaborations of the plays. See Emendations. 

Elizabeth, Queen. See Queen Elizabeth. 

Elizabeth, the English of, 208. 

Elizabethan Dramatists, estimate of, 202. 

Ellesmere, W. H. Smith's letter to, 187. 

Elze, Dr. Carl, believes the S. was in Germany and Scotland, 221. 

Emendations of the plays in first folio, extensiveness of, 234. 

English, a then neglected accomplishment, 217. 

A very rare accomplishment in Elizabeth's day, 41, 

Probably not taught in Stratford grammar school, 41. 

Purity of, used in plays, 218. 

The, of Elizabeth, 207. 

The, of Shakespeare, not derived from a study of contem- 
porary writers, 42. 
English Library, what was the, of Shakespeare's day, 230. 
English renaissance drama. See Renaissance drama, English. 
Enlargements of the plays in first folio. See Emendations. 
Entomology, knowledge of, displayed in the plays, 227-229. 
Epitaph on Shakespeare's tomb, 124. 

Epitaphs, by William Shakespeare, on Elias James, John a, 
Coombe, and others, 40. 



326 INDEX. 

Epitaphs, how Halliwell accounts for, 270. 

Of W. S. not claimed by anybody else, 231. 
Complete collection of, 119. 
Essex connected with plays, 284. 
Evelyn, his estimate of Shakespearean plays, 20. 
"Evening Mass," not necessarily indicative of Shakespeare's 

creed, 118. 
Evidence, internal, failure of, 296. 

Of historical plays as to Bacon, 242. 

Poetry not competent of, a fact, 131. 

See Typographical evidence, Printing. 
Expert evidence as to the plays, 303. 

F. 

Fac similes. See Forgery. 

" Falstaff in love," order for, 309, 310. 

Family of Shakespeare, not zealous of their relative's reputa- 

tion f 83. 
Farmer, Dr., his solution of the Shakespearean difficulty, 181. 

Specimen of, 182. 

His theory of Shakespeare, quite as incredible as the other, 
183. 

Stops just short of the truth, 183. 
Fel ton's portrait, 96. See Portraits. 
Female parts, taken by boys, 202. 

Fire, great, of London, not accountable for dearth of Shakes- 
pearean records, 79, 
First folio, contains only twenty-six known plays, 287. 

Dilemma presented by, 290. 

Evidence of authorship from, 312, 313, 314, 315. 

Inspection of, proves sources of, 314. 

Printed from Shakespeare's copies, 306-312. See Typograph- 
ical evidence. 

Time of appearance suggestive, 234. See Emendations. 
" Florio," the. in British Museum, 169. 
Flowers, knowledge of, displayed, in plays, 229. 
Forgery, fac simile is usually, 295. 

Literary, not difficult, 295. 

Of a signature, 295. 
French and Italian, not taught at Stratford school, 221. 



INDEX. 327 

Fuller, eight years oia wnen Shakespeare died. 269. 

Expert evidence of, 303, 304. 

Extract from, 269, note. 

His estimate of the Shakespearean plays, 20. 

His mention of Shakespeare, 77. 

Testimony as to Shakespeare's acquirements, 265, 266, note. 
Furness, W. II., unable to accept Shakespearean authorship, 
154, 201. 

G. 

Gallants, relations with managers, 274. 
Garrick Club bust, the, 105. See Portraits. 
Geography, knowledge of, displayed in plays, 219. 
Geology, knowledge of, in the plays, 213. 
Germany, Shakespeare in, Cohn's theory, 216. 
"Good friend, for Jesus's sake, forbear," etc., 124. 
Grammar School of Stratford. See Stratford School. 
Gravitation, law of, stated in the plays, 212. 
Great fire of London. See Fire. 
Greene, Robert, a father of the English stage, 252 

Cited as a witness, contra, 250, 251. 

Had his admirers, 251, note. 

His estimate of Wm. Shakespeare, 58. 

No worse than his kind, 252. 

Only contemporary of W. S. who exposed the forgery, 58 

The "steal" he complained of, 302. 

Title of his book, 126, note. 
Contents of, 266. 

Told the truth about Wm. Shakespeare, 124, 125, 126, note. 
"Groat's worth of wit." See Greene, 126. 
"Groom, Lord Leicester's," Delia Bacon's name for S., 193. 

H. 

Habitues of Shakespeare's theaters, who were, 37. 

Hallam, Henry, doubtful as to accepting S.'s authorship, 45. 

His estimate of the plays, 207. 

Opinion as to their philology, 207. 



328 INDEX. 

Halliwell, accounts for the epitaphs, 270. 

Follows Hallam, 302. 
Halliwell-Philliphs, J, 0„ his "outlines." 253. 

Does not dispel the difficulties, 254. 
Hamlet, believed by Delia Bacon to be key-note of plays, 190, 
Harrison, John, cited as a witness, 250. 

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, his narrative of Delia Bacon, 197, 198. 
Hawthornden, Drummond of. See Drummond of Hawthorri- 

den. 
Heminges & Condell, cited as witnesses, 250. 

Corroborate Jonson's testimony, 35. 

How procured emendations, 234, 235. 

Their " copy " for first folio, 315. 

Their reason for the first folio, 249, note. 
Henry the Sixth, Grant White's idea of, 303. 

Greene's complaint about, 302. 

Not Shakespeare's, 302. 

Wonderful "run" of, 307. 
Henry the Seventh, curious evidence of Bacon's, 242. 
Heywood, author of portions of "Passionate Pilgrim," 109. 

Writes plays of the period, 264. 
"Historic Doubt," the Shakespearean myth not a, 66. 
Historical evidence. See Circumstantial evidence. Passim. 
Historical plays, evidence of, as to Bacon, 242. 
History, Bacon thinks taught by drama, 242. 
Hume, David, his estimate of Shakespearean plays, 25. 
Hunter, Rev. Joseph, identifies Proserpo's Island, 87, note. 



Iago, a comedian's part, -308. 

Speech of, a striking paraphrase of Berni, 64. 
Ideal Shakespeare, every man may select his own, 99 
"Imogen" name and character, whence taken, 217. 
Imposture literary, state of the law favorable to, 113. 
Ingleby, Dr C. M., his plea for Shakespeare, 250 
Innuendo, evidence by way of, 237. 

Supporting Ben Jonson 238, note. 
Innuendoes, of Sir Tobie Matthew, 147, 237. 



INDEX. 329 

Insecurity of authorship, 109. See Authorship, Copyright, 
Printers, etc. 

Nashe's, testimony as to, 109. 

Heywood's, testimony as to, 109. 
Internal evidence. See Evidence, internal. 
Italian and French, not taught at Stratford school, 221. 
Italy, knowledge of, displayed in plays, 219, 220. 

Intricate acquaintance with manners and customs of, 220. 

J. 

" Jacques-Peter," probably original form of name " Shakes- 
peare," 172. 
James, King. See King James. 
Jansen, the S. portrait, 101. 

Johnson, Gerard, said to have made Stratford bust, 97. 
Johnson, Samuel, his estimate of Shakespearean plays, 26, 27, 28. 

Specimens of his commentaries on plays, 27. 
Joint authorship, Miss Bacon's theory was, 200. 
Jones, Inigo, devises trappings for court masques, 271. 
Jonson, Ben, a " famous witness," 152. 

An expert witness, 303, 304. 

Applies same words and figure to Bacon and to W. S. 145 

A university man, 43. 

Cited as a witness, contra, 250. 

His conversations with Drummond, 139. 

His "Discoveries" fatal to Shakespearean theory, 134-136. 

His fling at Shakespeare in prologue, etc., 138. 

His obituary verses, 129. 

His testimony, 129. 
Analysis of, 131. 

His opinion of the Droeshout likeness, 92-94. 
Why is libel on W. S., 98. 

His plays not popular, 272. 

Never mentions Bacon to W. S. or W. S. to Bacon, 145. 

Plays Boswell to Bacon and Shakespeare alike, 146. 

Studiously inclined, 43. 

Wants to blot out 1,000 Shakespearean lines, 137. 
Jordan, John, 74. 



330 INDEX 

Jordan, John, probable inventor of story and verses, 123. 
Judith Shakespeare, never taught to write her name. 40, 172. 

K. 

King James's letter, story of, when invented, 44, 167. 
King, Thomas, his " Plea" for Shakespeare, 248. 
His argument, 249. 

L. 

Ladies, seated on the stage, 273. 

Lampoon on Sir Thomas Lucy, two versions of, 123. 

Latinisms, in the plays, 207. 

Law in " Merchant of Venice," 215, note. 

Lawyers. See Young lawyers. 

Learning contained in the plays, 205. 

No reason for its being there, 229. 
Legal acquirements of author of the plays, 59, 214. 
Libraries, public or circulating, none in London, 52. 
Library. See English library. 

Did he have a, 266, 267. 

Plays can not be studied without a, 266. 

Plays not composed without a, 266. 

Shakespeare's, what it must have been, 212. 
License to print, meaning of a, 108. 
Ling & Trundell, procure copies in shorthand, 307. 

Proof of fact, 307. 
Lintot, Bernard, invented the King James letter story in 1710, 44, 

168. 
Literary imposture. See Imposture, literary. 
Literature, persecuted if unlicensed, 107. 

See Star Chamber, Copyright, 107. 
" Lord Leicester's groom." See " Groom." 
" Lover's complaint," appears with the Sonnets, 277. 
" Lucrece," of doubtful authorship, 41, 218. 
Lucy, Sir Thomas, lampoon on, 123. 

M. 

Macaulay, accounts for Bunyan's works, 165, 166. 
Maids of honor, seated on the stage, 273. 



INDEX. 331 

Malone, Edmund, his " chronologies," 86, 87. 

His contributions to Shakespearean biography, 76, et seq. 

His Shakespearean labors, 76, 80, 85. 

Whitewashes the Stratford bust, 97. 
Management, theatrical, no sinecure in 17th century, 48. 
Manuscripts, Bacon's Will directs certain, locked up, 244. 

.Delia Bacon's idea of their disposition, 193, 194. 

May yet come to light, 244. 

Minute and constant search for, 49, 50. 

Northumberland, discovered by Spedding, 242. 
Marshall's picture, 95. See Portraits. 
Masques, William Shakespeare wrote none, 271. 
Massey, Gerald, makes a romance from sonnets, 283. 
Matthew, Sir Tobie, banters Bacon r 237. 

His postscripts, 180, 181, 236, 237. 

Innuendos of, 181. 

Knew Bacon, but not Shakespeare, 147. 
Quotation from, to this effect, 148. 

Why he did not reveal Bacon's secret, 152, note. 
Medicine, knowledge of, displayed in the plays, 210-215. 
Medico-Legal knowledge, displayed in the plays, 215. 
Merchant of Venice, law in, 245, note. 
Meres, Francis, cited as a witness, 250. 

His testimony critical, not historical, 132. 
Merry Wives of Windsor, story of order for, may be true, 310. 

Eebuke to lechery in, 310. 

Perhaps to Elizabeth, 310, note. 
Milton, John, first to claim author's copyright, 108. 

His Areopagitica, 108. 

His estimate of Shakespearean plays, 20, 36. 
Value of his estimate, 20, 36. 
Mitylene, curious custom prevalent in, alluded to in Pericles, 

55, note. 
Monasteries, dissolution of the, 175. 
Monastery, Christian, in Ephesus, 116. 
Montgomery, perhaps connected with plays, 284. 
Music, familiarity with, 297, note. 



332 INDEX. 

N. 

Nashe, Thomas, his testimony to insecurity of authorship, 109. 
New and Delia Bacon theories, coincide, 299. 
New theory, alternative presented by, 262. 

Further details of, 284. 

The, what is, 256. 
Newton, his discoveries anticipated by plays, 212. 
Northumberland MSS., discovered by Spedding, 242. 
" Noverint," what Nashe may have meant by, 245. 

0. 

Oldys, story about a brother of William Shakespeare, 84. 

Orthography of name Shakespeare, 169-171. 

Othello, appears seven years after Shakespeare's death, 290. 

P. 

Palmerston, Lord, convert to Baconian theory, 143. 

His idea of Ben Jonson, 143. 
Papist, was W. S. a, 74, 117. 
Parallelisms, argument from in Baconian theory, 238. 

Holmes's list of, 238. 

Examples of, 239, 240. 

Eeduced to an ordo by Holmes, 241. 
Passionate Pilgrim, not written by W. S., 276. 

Shakespeare's name removed in 3d edition, 276. 

The, written partly by Hey wood, 109. 
Pascal, difference between his case and Shakespeare's, 55. 
Pembroke, a dedication of Sonnets to, insulting, 282. 

Sonnets could not be dedicated to, 281. 
Pepys, his estimate of Shakespearean plays, 20. 
" Pericles," allusion to a peculiar custom in, 55, note. 

Eejected by first folio, but restored by Shakespeareans, 290. 
Phillips. See Halliwell-Phillips. ' 
Philological test of Shakespearean plays, 205-207. 
Pickpockets, pilloried on the stage, 259, note, 
Plagiarism. See Authorship, Greene, Heywood, Plays, Printers. 
Plays, anachronisms not misleading, 118. 

Audiences of the, not critical as to the dialogue, 13. 



INDEX. 333 

Plays, authorship of, revealed, 312, 313, 314, 315. 
Boys took female parts in, 273. 
Classical knowledge of the, 208. 
Contemporary criticism of the character of, 14. 
Doubt as to single authorship of, 300. 
Dramatic license of these, 118. 

Emendations of, in first folio. See Emendations, First folio. 
Forty-two credited to W. Shakespeare, 290. 
How put into type, 112, 306, 307. 
Manuscripts of, jealously guarded by theaters, 115 
Manuscripts of the, how procured, 110. 
Name of actors in, 314. 
Name of author of, 296. 
Need not have been didactic, 271, 272. 
Not composed without a library, 266. 
No tradition connecting Shakespeare with composition of, 

267. 
Ordinarily mere local sketches, 263, 264. 
Passed with first audiences as Shakespeare's, 15. 
Printed instead of acted, 263. 
Probable reason why called Shakespeare's, 56. 
Shakespearean, canon of, 291. 
Sources of unauthorized reprints of, 307. 
Tabulated, 289. 

Taken down in shorthand, 307. 
The, a phenomenon in experience, 1. 
The " copyrights " of, 50. 

Not mentioned in the will, 50. 
The doubtful. See Doubtful plays. 
Their action only used, 272. 
The masses not " up " to, to-day, 261. 
The philological test of, 205-207. 
The present text made by piecemeal since W. S.'s death, 

112. 
The, were popular with their first audiences, 15. 
Traces in, of aristocratic authorship, 283. 
Typographical evidence of authorship of, 312, 313, 314, 315. 
Use of Warwickshire names in the, 248. 
Use of Warwickshire expressions in the, 248. 



334 INDEX. 

Plays, were performed, 305, 306, 307. 

Where did the printers get hold of, 105, 306, 307. See Print- 
ers, Typographical evidence. 

Why Bacon may not have acknowledged, 316. 

Written to be played, not printed, 106. 
Poems, dedication of, to Southampton, 179. 

Fathered upon Shakespeare, 180. 

The. See their various titles. 
" Poetaster," the, a hit at Shakespeare in, 256, note. 
Poetical works of William Shakespeare, complete collection, 119. 
Poetry, not competent evidence of a fact, 131. 
Pope, Alexander, his apprentices write parts of, 295. 

His estimate of plays, 26. 

Indicates portions to admire, 205. 
Portraits, Boaden's account of the, 90. 

Bust in possession of Garrick Club, 105. 

Criticised as if purely ideal, 92. 

Droeshout, the only one that ever was authenticated, 92. 

Earlom's copy, 102. 

One lately discovered in Australia, 104. 

Shakespearean argument from the, 91, 92. 

The Chandos, 99. 

The Felton Head. 

The Jansen, 101. 

The Marshall. 

The Stratford bust, 97. 

The Zuccharo, 101. 
" Practicable " scenery, unknown, 260. 

Exceptions, 260, note. 
Presumption, the, as to the Shakespearean authorship, its value,15. 

Well disturbed in 1856, 187. 
Printed matter, most careful record of, in those days, 116. 
Printers, assigned any name they pleased to literary work, 109. 

Did what they pleased with literary work, 109. 

Of first folio followed copy too closely, 314. 

Where did they get " copy " for the plays, 105, 112. 
Printing, knowledge of, displayed in plays, 222-227. 

Of the Sonnets. See Sonnets. 
Prologue to " Every Man in his Humour," 138. See Jonson, Ben. 



INDEX. 335 

Proof reader, of first folio, 309. 

Prophesy, no such thing as a prophet of the past, 56. 

Proserpo's Island "located," by Hunter, 87, note; by Dowden, 

88, note. 
Pseudonymic authorship. See anonymous. 
Putnam's Magazine, article in, 185. See Bacon, Delia. 

a. 

Queen Elizabeth, her apochryphal correspondence with W. S., 
168. 

Her order for Falbtaff may be true, 309, 310. 

Legend of her order for " Merry Wives," 150, note. 
Queen Elizabeth's glove, story of, 168. 
Question of the authorship, why not raised earlier, 18. 

First raised in Chamber's Journal, 185. 

R. 

Kaleigh, knows nothing of William Shakespeare, 149. 

Perhaps connected with plays, 284. 

Suggested as an author of the S. Drama, 175. 
" Katsei's Ghost," pamphlet of, 243. 
Ravenscroft, his estimate of Shakespearean plays, 23. 
Readings, various, of the text of the plays, what they prove, 34. 
Red cloth issued to Shakespeare, 309, note. 
Renaissance drama, English, 174, 202. 
Reynolds, Sir Joshua, copies the Chandos, 99. 
Roman Catholic, was Shakespeare a, 117. 
" Rosalin's complaint," not by W. S., 283. 
Rowe, his life of W. S., probably honest, 76. 
Rutland, perhaps connected with plays, 284. 
Rymer, Thomas, his estimate of Shakespearean plays, 24 

S. 

Scenery. See Practicable scenery, 260. 
" Schoolmaster Story." See Beeston. 
Scotland, Dr. Elze thinks Shakespeare was in, 221. 
Sea-coast of Bohemia, 230. 

A part of the stage business, 178. 

A theory for, 178, note. 



336 INDEX. 

Second-best bed, explained by Shakespeareans, 89. 
Shaftesbury, his estimate of Shakespearean plays, 24. 
Shakespeare, John, ale-taster of Stratford, 46. 

Fined for throwing muck, 253. 

Records of his life, 46. 
Shakespeare, Judith. See Judith Shakespeare. 
Shakespeare, Mrs. Wm., why she did not live with her husband, 

90. 
Shakespeare, Susanna. See Susanna Hall. 

Slandered by a neighbor, 253. 
Law suit for 253. 
Shakespeare, the name, original form probably "Jacques-Peter," 

172. 
Shakespeare, William, a good penman, 32. 

A reckless borrower, 265. 

Authography of the name, 169. 

Author, not editor, 303. 

A "utility" gentleman in the stock company, 31-33. 

"Autograph" in British Museum, 169. 

A wag, not a worker, 304. 

Born versed in all knowledge? 219. 

Career in Stratford, 47. 

Covers his tracks well, 293. 

Credited with forty-two plays in lifetime, 290. 

Did he make emendations to plays, 234, 235, 236. 

Did he write Bacon's works, 204. 

Did not write his first composition in his native patois, 41. 

Difficulties presented by his Will, 49. 

Does not disclaim authorship of Passionate Pilgrim, 276. 

Dramatic canon of, and Bacon, 203 

Editor, not author. 306-308. 

Expert evidence as to, 303. 

Family. See Family of Shakespeare. 

" Father " anything, willing to, 287. 

Fortunate enough to secure a poet, 176, 177. 

Funny Mr., 304. 

His authorship disproved by first folio, 313, 314, 315. 

His birthday, 157. 

St. George's day selected for, 158. 



INDEX. 337 

Shakespeare, William, his "business" rejected, 298. 
His death bed, 125, 126. 
His income, in modern figures, $25,000, 40. 
His income, perhaps exaggerated by Ward, 75. 
His interest to keep plays out of print, if his, 115. 
His library. See Library, 266. 
His literary acquirements, 39. 
His name a safe pseudonym, 284. 
His name discovered in Northumberland MSS., 242. 
His rapid accumulation of wealth, 43. 

A self-made man, 43. 
His supposed travels, 216. 
His weakness for pedigrees, 256, note. 
Holding horses, story not improbable, 168. 
Interpolates as he copies, 304. 
Interpolates popular songs, 309. 
Made his money by acting, 244. 
Makes Iago a comedian, 308. 
May have been pre-contracted to his wife, 253. 
Name possesses market value, 257, 263. 
Name removed from 3d edition of " Passionate Pilgrim," 276. 
Natural that he should have followed players to London, 51. 
Never suspected his reputation, 305. 
No pride of authorship in, 268. 
Not a law student, 245. 

Not solicitous or expectant of any posthumous fame, 48. 
No tradition connecting, with composition of plays, 267. 
No uncertainty as to his character, 38. 
Nowhere met in tradition or history, as a school-boy, 40. 
One " biographer " of, 161. 

Only one attempt to prove him a university man, 222. 
Other duties, 33. 

Out of favor with King James, 150, note. 
Portraits of, 91. 

Usually criticised as if purely ideal, 92. 
Probably remodeled the plays, 177. 
Records of his life, 46. 
Retires to money lending in Stratford, 233. 
Rev. Richard Davie's life of, 73. 



338 INDEX. 

Shakespeare, William, R. G. White accuses him of " want of 
probity," 303. 

Sketches Dogberry, 298, 299. 

Specimen of his wit, 270. 

Speculations as to first employment, 257. 

"Wanted art," 140. 

Was he admitted to noble companionship? 274. 

Was he a Roman Catholic? 117. 

Was not lawyer, physician, etc., 297. 

Was there any-thing he did not know? 230. 

Where did he find his leisure? 231. 

Where did he get his material ? question never asked, 166, 
167. 

Who wrote. See Who wrote Shakespeare. Passim. 

Why he purchased arms, 274. 

Wrote no masques, 271. 
Shakespearean question, not what, but who? 296. 
Shakespeare's Poetical Works, complete collection of, 119. 
Sharpham, his evidence, 306. 
" Shylock " appears at a suggestive time, 233. 
Sidney, description of theatrical properties, 258. 
Siege of Troy, gunpowder at, 179. 
Signatures, 295. See Forgery. 
Smith, W. II., can not accept S.'s authorship, 154. 

Follows Miss Bacon, does not claim priority over her, 187. 

Thinks that W. S. could not read or write, 171. 
Songs, Shakespeare introduces popular, 309. 
Sonnets, authorship of, not involved in this question, 276. 

Dedicated by their printer to friend of his own, 277. 

Mr. Bernsdorfs theory as to, 280. 

Mr. Boaden's theory of, 279. 

Mr. Brown's theory is of doubtful force, 279. 

M. Chasles's theory as to, 280. 

Mr. Dowden's theory as to, 280. 

Mr. Massey,s theory as to, 282. 

Mr. Minto's theory as to, 280. 

Mr. Niel's theory as to, 282. 

Mr. Thompson's theory as to, 280. 

Mr. Wordsworth's theory as to, 280. 



INDEX. 339 

Sonnets, speculations as to meaning of, 278-282. 

Why assigned to Shakespeare, 277. 
Southampton, a comparatively poor man, 273, 311. 

Dedication to, as "Mr. W. H. ."insulting, 282. 

Alleged acquaintance with Shakespeare, 41, 311, 312. 

Did he forget his caste ? 273, 274. 

His gift to Shakespeare incredible, 41, 180. 

How perhaps connected with plays, 284. 

Never suspected of literary tastes, 1, 273. 

No evidence that he knew Shakespeare, 311, 312. 

Biographers find no trace of it, 311. 

Story manufactured by Shakespeareans, 311, 312. 

Poems dedicated to, 179. 

Story of his munificence, why probably a forgery, 44, 311 , 312. 

Supposed friendship for Shakespeare, 273. 

Why great doubt as to his being a companion of Shakes- 
peare, 40. 
Spedding, James, believed in more than one author of Henry 

VIII., 184. • 
Spenser and Chaucer, the great fire not fatal to records of, 80. 
Spenser, his reference to " Gentle Willie," explained, 148, note. 

His reference to "iEtion," 147, note. 
Stage, best seats were on the, 273. 

"Business," probably not written by author of text, 117. 
See " Business." 

Modern, rejects the Shakespearean "business" 

Then only available depot for literary work, 174. 
Star Chamber, court of, 106. 

Had jurisdiction of literary matter, id. 
Stationers' Company, the blood-hound of the Star Chamber, 107. 

The origin of, 107. 
Steele, Richard, his estimate of Shakespearean plays, 26. 
St. George's day, selected as a birth-day for W. S. 158. 
Stratford bust, 97. See Portraits. 

Said to be by Gerard Johnson, 97. 

Said to be by Thomas Stanton. 105. 
Stratford Grammar School, was W. S. a pupil of, 52. 
Stratford portrait, the, 105. 
Stratford School, speculations as to, 42, 52, 53, 214, 217. 



340 INDEX. 

Stratford, vicar of, treats Miss Bacon tenderly, 198. 
Style, literary, not reliable evidence, 294. 

Of Bacon and Shakespeare dissimilar, 294. 

Of the Shakespearean plays, 205. 

Reader must judge for himself as to, 294. 
" Suppers after the play," 274 
Susanna Hall, enigmatical epitaph over, 85. 
Swift, Dean, his estimate of Shakespearean plays, 23. 

T. 

Taine, his picture of Shakespearean theaters, 258. 

Of Shakespearean audiences, 259. 
Tate, Nahum, his estimate of Shakespearean plays, 21. 
" Tempest," was a drollery in Ben Jonson's day, 139, note. 
Theater, management of, a precarious livelihood in the 17th 

century, 48. 
Theaters, best seats on the stage, 259. 

Of Shakespeare's day, description of, 258. 

Shakespearean habitues of, 37. See Audiences, Plays. 
Theobald and others, anticipate compromise theory, 301. 
Theobald believed in more than one Shakespearean author, 181. 
Theories, compromise between, 300. 

Shakespearean, three well denned, 188. See New Theory, 
Delia Bacon, and Baconian. 

"Who anticipated, 301. 
Thompson, Win., his " Renaissance Drama," 247. 

Thinks manuscripts may be safe, 244. 
Thorpe, Thomas, dedicates the Sonnets to a friend, 277, 278. 

Prints and copyrights the Sonnets, 277. 
Trade-mark, sort of common in name, 292. 
Travels, Wm. Shakespeare's supposed, 216. 
Treatises, scientific, the audiences did not want, 229. 
" Troilus and Cressida," 285. See Doubtful plays. 
Troy. See Siege of Troy . 
" True, original copies," proof of what they were, 313, 314. See 

Copies, First folio, Typographical evidence. 
Typographical evidence of authorship, 312, 313, 314, 315. 



INDEX. 341 



U. 



Ulrici, opinion of, learning of plays, 221. 

Unitary theory, property of Smith and Holmes. See Bacon, 
Delia, 200. 

V. 

Vega, Lope de, computed to have written 21,300,000 verses, 184. 

Writes " without blotting a line," 184. 
Venice, knowledge of, displayed in plays, 219. 
Venus and Adonis, argument from that poem alone, 43. 

Boldness of assignment to W. S., 275. 

Popularity of, 293. 

Why not a first production, 294. 

Why of doubtful authorship, 41, 218. 

w. 

Ward, Dominie, hears about Shakespeare, 304. 

Testimony as to Shakespeare's acquirements, 265. 
Ward, Rev. John, his account of W. S., 68. 
Warwickshire, names, use of, in the plays, 248. 

Expressions, use of in plays. 248. 
" Watch," the, actual curiosities, 305. 

Burghley's account of, 305, note. 
Werner, anticipated by the plays, 213. 
" Wet combats," wit combats were, 268. 

Is it a misprint ? 269. 
" W. H.," a friend of Thorpe, dedicator or dedicatee ? 278. 

Theories as to meaning of, 280-282. 

Various translations of, 279. 

Who was he? 109, 279, 280, 282. 
White, R. G., admits that managers " kept a poet," 85, note. 

His idea of Henry VI., 303. 

Opinion of English of plays, 218. 
Who wrote Shakespeare ? Passim. Question first asked in 

1852, 185. 
Wilkes, Geo., his "American Point of View," 247. 
Will, difficulties of the, explained, 271. 



342 INDEX. 

Will, no mention of any plays in, 50. 

Or of any theatrical property, 50. 
" Wit combats," were "wet combats," 268. 
Wood, Anthony, his mention of W. S., 78. 
Works, poetical, of W. S. See Poetical works. 
Wotton, description of a popular play, 263. 

Description of theaters of his days, 258. 

y. 

" Young ladies' argument," the, 91. 

Young lawyers, wrote plays rapidly, 84, note. 

z. 

Zuccharo, portrait, the, 107. See Portraits. 



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* 



BEYOND SHAKESPEARE'S TALENT. 



Leonora Giffenstein's Argument that Ba- 
con Wrote the Plays. 

Dear Amateur Writers:— When I see the 
battle growing so warm, and Mr. Barr's 
side standing valiantly against the assault 
of many, I am compelled to again appear 
in these columns. I have been away for 
Ave months, and during this time I must 
confess, I saw but little of our page, so 
in dealing with this question, I am liable 
to unwittingly repeat much that has been 
written before. If I do so, pray forgive 
me, for this will be my last appearance 
at our meetings for some time in all prob- 
ability. 

Till the past year, I held the views of 
the Shakespeare contingent. I knew noth- 
ing about the arguments of the then op- 
posing side, but all my sentimentality and 
romanticism urged me to support Shakes- 
peare's claim. Bacon assumed the shape 
of a calculating, cold-blooded, inhuman 
monster in contrast to the warm-hearted, 
all-enveloping humanity of William 
Shakespeare. And nowl have changed— a 
great change indeed, for my mind has 
now won my heart over to the anti- 
Shakespeare cause. It seems to me so 
improbable— why I might say impossible 
for a man of Shakespeare's education to 
have created such masterpieces. You will 
say that there have been authors time 
and again who have risen from the low- 
est depths with little or no education, and 
yet have composed great works. Ah, yes, 
Shakespeare may have had the breadth 
and depth of mind to embody what was 
given to him in beautiful -and grand form, 
but it seems impossible to me that he 
could have had sufficient acquaintance 
with foreign authorities. He may have 
had sufficient understanding but deficient 
knowledge. 

Ben Jonson accords Shakespeare "small 
Latin and less Greek," and certain his- 
torians assert that he seems to have ac- 
„ quired some knowledge of Italian and 
French. He seems to have had knowledge 
of many branches of learning, if you 
judge from his plays, but this is deduc- 
tive reasoning, whereas in this discussion, 
we should rather reason inductively. You 
will say that it is absurd for one to try 
to prove that Shakespeare wrote the 
plays, since it has been conceded for so 
many years. For years and years people 
believed the earth was shaped like a 
shield. In these latter days authority is 
becoming a poor argument. 

In opposition to Shakespeare's common 
school education, consider the advantages 
of Francis Bacon. At the age of twelve 
he was sent to Trinity College, Cam- 
bridge; when he graduated he traveled 
abroad; then he studied law, and, mixing 
with court powers, daily imbibed the at 



•mosphere of wit and learning. Contrast 
this life with Shakespeare's — barren of 
studious possibilities. Hofiv much more\ 
probable Is it th$it a maPt'Jwith such op- 
portunities, with an ancestry of intelli- 
gent, accomplished, educated people, 
wrote "Hamlet" and "Macbeth" and 
"Midsummer Night's Dream," than a 
man of small education and very few 
chances, who sprang from the gentry of 
the county, it is true, but whose own fa- 
ther could not write his name, and who 
himself did not deem education of enough 
account to have his daughter, Judith, 
taught how to write. 

It is a much enforced argument on the 
opposing side that those writings publish- 
ed over Bacon's name are so entirely 
different in style and thought and gen- 
eral trend of character from "William 
Shakespeare's." It seems rather natural 
to me that such should be so. The for- 
mer he wrote as the rising young lawyer, 
as the eloquent peer, as the Lord Chan- 
cellor—a man of the world in all things. 
The latter may have been written in the 
silence and solitude of his own room, 
where, knowing his professional capacity 
was to be kept secret, he could let his 
genius play unrestrained without fear 
of comment upon the Lord Chancellor. 
What a delight such composition must 
have been to the man who wrote* "The 
Wisdom of the Ancients." 

Perhaps it is too hard a task for you 
to change your preconceived and preju- 
diced idea or' Bacon as a selfish politician, 
and to reject Shakespeare fov hiro. Then 
fcA-e idea of jo-nt creation of the plays will 
\~z easier to you. Shakespeare's biogra- 
phers admit the little tale of his having 
stolen a deer from Sir Thomas Lucy, 
of Charlcote, and the coarse lampooning 
ballad that he fastened on this gentle- 
man's gates has come down to us. Con- 
trast it with "How sweet the moonlight 
sleeps upon the bank," in "The Merchant 
of Venice." Shakespeare had some skill 
at versifying, and perhaps his mind was 
the sieve through which the first idea of 
the play was strained— I'll grant you that 
if you wish — but there must have been 
collaboration with minds that could sup- 
ply his deficiency as regards the sources 
of most of the plots, legal terms, and cus- 
toms, and the wealth of classical imag- 
ery. In London Shakespeare attached 
himself to some theatrical company. In 
those days of insatiable longing for new 
plays, each company had its own play- 
wright. Sometimes as many as six 
dramatists worked in conjunction upon 
one play. It is admitted that Shakespeare 
joined this branch of labor, and, with 
Robert Greene and Christopher Marlowe, 
wrote plays that he "afterward rewrote 
alone and brought out as his own, as 'The 
Taming of the Shrew,' and the second 
and third parts of 'King Henry VI.' ' 
Robert Greene afterward, on his death- 



bed, made complaint that Shakespeare 
had stolen these "feathers" from his col- 
laborators. 

King- James once said of one of Francis 
Bacon's works, that "it is like the peace 
of God; it passeth all understanding." We 
must say such a thing about William 
Shakespeare, if we admit that he alone 
supplied all the knowledge that makes 
the plays so wonderful. 

You say, Mr. Barr, that you do claim it 
and boast it. Have you any right to do 
so? The grandeur of the dramas is cer- 
tainly not lessened by the idea of collab- 
oration. Whoever wrote them, the plays 
remain the same, and we can feel as much 
love for them if the joint work of a num- 
ber of Elizabethan dramatists as of one | 
common-school man. We have no right I 
surely, to explain the writing of the plays I 
by upholding what would be an almost \ 
supernatural man, when we can explain 
the "phenomena" by a simply understood, 
natural fact. 

LEONORA HOTIDE GIFPENSTEIN. 



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